■& >. ;..; on 

- .Ml) 



Mil Villi! 



AMILTON 

O' -&.A3rri 



II 



iP 5 CANNOT LEAVE THE LIBRARY. I 



Chap . 


?SS^S3 


Shelf 


, _3 € 





COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



wm LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



BOOKS AND CULTURE 



BOOKS BY MR. MABIE. 



MY STUDY FIRE. 
MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series. 
UNDER THE TREES AND ELSE- 
WHERE. 
SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. 

ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRE- 
TATION. 

ESSAYS ON NATURE AND CULTURE. 



BOOKS AND CULTURE 

BY HAMILTON WRIGHT 
MABIE 




^e\\V vv 



NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
MDCCCXCVI 






3\W 



. , . .« rCotyright, 7.896, 

'., &y»Dgdd, Mead atjd Company. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



To 
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Material and Method ... 7 

II. Time and Place .... 

III. Meditation and Imagination 

IV. The First Delight 
V. The Feeling for Literature 

VI. The Books of Life 

VII. From the Book to the Reader 

VIII. By Way of Illustration 

IX. Personality .... 

X. Liberation Through Ideas 

XI. The Logic of Free Life 

XII. The Imagination . 

XIII. Breadth of Life . 

XIV. Racial Expression 
XV. Freshness of Feeling . 



20 

34 

5i 

63 

74 

85 

95 

109 

121 

132 

H3 

*54 

165 

*74 



Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVI. Liberation From One's Time 185 

XVII. Liberation From One's Place 195 

XVIII. The Unconscious Element . 204 

XIX. The Teaching of Tragedy . 217 

XX. The Culture t Element in 

Fiction 

XXI. Culture Through Action 



XXII. The Interpretation of Idealism 250 



XXIII. The Vision of Perfection 

XXIV. Retrospect .... 



229 
239 



260 

271 



Chapter I. 

Material and Method. 

TF the writer who ventures to say- 
something more about books 
and their uses is wise, he will not 
begin with an apology ; for he will 
know that, despite all that has been 
said and written on this engrossing 
theme, the interest of books is in- 
exhaustible, and that there is always 
a new constituency to read them. 
So rich is the vitality of the great 
books of the world that men are 
never done with them ; not only 
does each new generation read them, 
but it is compelled to form some 
judgment of them. In this way 
7 



Material and Method. 

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, 
and their fellow-artists, are always 
coming into the open court of pub- 
lic opinion, and the estimate in 
which they are held is valuable 
chiefly as affording material for a 
judgment of the generation which 
forms it. An age which understands 
and honours creative artists must 
have a certain breadth of view and 
energy of spirit ; an age which fails 
to recognise their significance fails to 
recognise the range and splendour 
of life, and has, therefore, a certain 
inferiority. 

We cannot get away from the 
great books of the world, because 
they preserve and interpret the life 
of the world ; they are inexhaustible, 
because, being vitally conceived, 
they need the commentary of that 
wide experience which we call history 
8 



Material and Method. 

to bring out the full meaning of the 
text ; they are our perpetual teach- 
ers, because they are the most com- 
plete expressions, in that concrete 
form which we call art, of the 
thoughts, acts, dispositions, and pas- 
sions of humanity. There is no 
getting to the bottom of Shake- 
speare, for instance, or to the end of 
his possibilities of enriching and in- 
teresting us, because he deals habit- 
ually with that primary substance 
of human life which remains sub- 
stantially unchanged through all the 
mutations of racial, national, and 
personal condition, and which is al- 
ways, and for all men, the object of 
supreme interest. Time, which is 
the relentless enemy of all that is 
partial and provisional, is the friend 
of Shakespeare, because it continu- 
ally brings to the student of his 
9 



Material and Method. 

work illustration and confirmation 
of its truth. There are many things 
in his plays which are more intel- 
ligible and significant to us than they 
were to the men who heard their 
musical cadence on the rude Eliza- 
bethan stage, because the ripening of 
experience has given the prophetic 
thought an historical demonstration ; 
and there are truths in these plays 
which will be read with clearer eyes 
by the men of the next century than 
they are now read by us. 

It is this prophetic quality in the 
books of power which silently moves 
them forward with the inaudible ad- 
vance of the successive files in the 
ranks of the generations, and which 
makes them contemporary with each 
generation. For while the mediaeval 
frame-work upon which Dante con- 
structed the cc Divine Comedy " be- 
10 



Material and Method. 

comes obsolete, the fundamental 
thought of the poet about human 
souls and the identity of the deed 
and its result not only remains true 
to experience but has received the 
most impressive confirmation from 
subsequent history and from psy- 
chology. 

It is as impossible, therefore, to 
get away from the books of power as 
from the stars ; every new generation 
must make acquaintance with them, 
because they are as much a part of 
that order of things which forms the 
background of human life as nature 
itself. With every intelligent man 
or woman the question is not, cc Shall 
I take account of them ? " but " How 
shall I get the most and the best 
out of them for my enrichment and 
guidance ? " 

It is with the hope of assisting 
ii 



Material and Method. 

some readers and students of books, 
and especially those who are at the 
beginning of the ardours, the de- 
lights, and the perplexities of the 
book-lover, that these chapters are 
undertaken. They assume nothing 
on the part of the reader but a de- 
sire to know the best that has been 
written ; they promise nothing on 
the part of the writer but a frank 
and familiar use of experience in a 
pursuit which makes it possible for 
the individual life to learn the les- 
sons which universal life has learned, 
and to piece out its limited personal 
experience with the experience of 
humanity. One who loves books, 
like one who loves a particular bit 
of a country, is always eager to make 
others see what he sees ; that there 
have been other lovers of books and 
views before him does not put him 

12 



Material and Method. 

in an apologetic mood. There can- 
not be too many lovers of the best 
things in these pessimistic days, 
when to have the power of loving 
anything is beginning to be a great 
and rare gift. 

The word love in this connection 
is significant of a very definite atti- 
tude toward books, — an attitude not 
uncritical, since it is love of the best 
only, but an attitude which implies 
more intimacy and receptivity than 
the purely critical temper makes pos- 
sible ; an attitude, moreover, which 
expects and invites something more 
than instruction or entertainment, — 
both valuable, wholesome, and neces- 
sary, and yet neither descriptive of 
the richest function which the book 
fulfils to the reader. To love a book 
is to invite an intimacy with it which 
opens the way to its heart. One of 
13 



Material and Method. 

the wisest of modern readers has said 
that the most important character- 
istic of the real critic — the man who 
penetrates the secret of a work of 
art — is the ability to admire greatly ; 
and there is but a short step between 
admiration and love. And as if to 
emphasise the value of a quality so 
rare among critics, the same wise 
reader, who was also the greatest 
writer of modern times, says also 
that cc where keen perception unites 
with good will and love, it gets at 
the heart of man and the 'world ; 
nay, it may hope to reach the high- 
est goal of all." To get at the heart 
of that knowledge, life, and beauty 
which are stored in books is surely 
one way of reaching the highest 
goal. 

That goal, in Goethe's thought, 
was the complete development of 
14 



Material and Method, 

the individual life through thought, 
feeling, and action, — an aim often 
misunderstood, but which, seen on 
all sides, is certainly the very highest 
disclosed to the human spirit. And 
the method of attaining this result 
was the process, also often and widely 
misunderstood, of culture. This 
word carries with it the implication 
of natural, vital growth, but it has 
been confused with an artificial, me- 
chanical process, supposed to be 
practised as a kind of esoteric cult 
by a small group of people who hold 
themselves apart from common 
human experiences and fellowships. 
Mr. Symonds, concerning whose 
representative character as a man of 
culture there is no difference of opin- 
ion, said that he had read with some 
care the newspaper accounts of his 
"culture,'' and that, so far as he 
i5 



Material and Method. 

could gather, his newspaper critics 
held the opinion that culture is a 
kind of knapsack which a man straps 
on his back, and in which he places a 
vast amount of information, gathered, 
more or less at random, in all parts 
of the world. There was, of course, 
a touch of humour in Mr. Symonds's 
description of the newspaper concep- 
tion of culture ; but it is certainly 
true that culture has been regarded 
by a great many people either as a 
kind of intellectual refinement, so 
highly specialised as to verge on fas- 
tidiousness, or as a large accumula- 
tion of miscellaneous information. 

Now, the process of culture is 
an unfolding and enrichment of the 
human spirit by conforming to the 
laws of its own growth ; and the re- 
sult is a broad, rich, free human life. 
Culture is never quantity, it is al- 
16 



Material and Method. 

ways quality of knowledge ; it is 
never an extension of ourselves by 
additions from without, it is always 
enlargement of ourselves by develop- 
ment from within ; it is never some- 
thing acquired, it is always some- 
thing possessed ; it is never a result 
of accumulation, it is always a result 
of growth. That which characterises 
the man of culture is not the extent 
of his information, but the quality 
of his mind ; it is not the mass of 
things he knows, but the sanity, the 
ripeness, the soundness of his nature. 
A man may have great knowledge 
and remain uncultivated ; a man may 
have comparatively limited knowl- 
edge and be genuinely cultivated. 
There have been famous scholars 
who have remained crude, unripe, 
inharmonious in their intellectual 

life, and there have been men of 
2 17 



Material and Method. 

small scholarship who have found all 
the fruits of culture. The man of 
culture is he who has so absorbed 
what he knows that it is part of 
himself. His knowledge has not 
only enriched specific faculties, it 
has enriched him ; his entire na- 
ture has come to ripe and sound 
maturity. 

This personal enrichment is the 
very highest and finest result of in- 
timacy with books ; compared with 
it the instruction, information, re- 
freshment, and entertainment which 
books afford are of secondary im- 
portance. The great service they 
render us — the greatest service that 
can be rendered us — is the enlarge- 
ment, enrichment, and unfolding of 
ourselves; they nourish and develop 
that mysterious personality which 
lies behind all thought, feeling, and 
18 



Materia] and Method. 

action ; that central force within us 
which feeds the specific activities 
through which we give out ourselves 
to the world, and, in giving, find and 
recover ourselves. 



*9 



Chapter II. 

Time and Place. 

npO get at the heart of Shakes- 
peare's plays, and to secure 
for ourselves the material and the 
development of culture which are 
contained in them, is not the work 
of a day or of a year; it is the work 
and the joy of a lifetime. There is 
no royal road to the harmonious un- 
folding of the human spirit ; there 
is a choice of methods, but there are 
no " short cuts." No man can seize 
the fruits of culture prematurely ; 
they are not to be had by pulling 
down the boughs of the tree of 
knowledge, so that he who runs 
20 



Time and Place. 

may pluck as he pleases. Culture 
is not to be had by programme, by- 
limited courses of reading, by cor- 
respondence, or by following short 
prescribed lines of home study. 
These are all good in their degree 
of thoroughness of method and worth 
of standards, but they are impotent 
to impart an enrichment which is 
below and beyond mere acquirement. 
Because culture is not knowledge but 
wisdom, not quantity of learning 
but quality, not mass of informa- 
tion but ripeness and soundness of 
temper, spirit, and nature, time is 
an essential element in the process 
of securing it. A man may acquire 
information with great rapidity, but 
no man can hasten his growth. If 
the fruit is forced, the flavour is lost. 
To get into the secret of Shake- 
speare, therefore, one must take 

21 



Time and Place. 

time. One must grow into that 
secret. 

This does not mean, however, 
that the best things to be gotten 
out of books are reserved for people 
of leisure ; on the contrary, they are 
oftenest possessed by those whose 
labours are many and whose leisure 
is limited. One may give his whole 
life to the pursuit of this kind of 
excellence, but one does not need to 
give his whole time to it. Culture 
is cumulative ; it grows steadily in 
the man who takes the fruitful atti- 
tude toward life and art ; it is secured 
by the clear purpose which so utilises 
all the spare minutes that they prac- 
tically constitute an unbroken dura- 
tion of time. James Smetham, the 
English artist, feeling keenly the im- 
perfections of his training, formulated 
a plan of study combining art, litera- 

22 



Time and Place. 

ture, and the religious life, and de- 
voted twenty-five years to working 
it out. Goethe spent more than 
sixty years in the process of devel- 
oping himself harmoniously on all 
sides ; and few men have wasted less 
time than he. And yet in the case 
of each of these rigorous and faithful 
students there were other, and, for 
long periods, more engrossing occu- 
pations. Any one who knows men 
widely will recall those whose persist- 
ent utilisation of the odds and ends 
of time, which many people regard as 
of too little value to save by using, 
has given their minds and their 
lives that peculiar distinction of taste, 
manner, and speech which belong to 
genuine culture. 

It is not wealth of time, but 
what Mr. Gladstone has aptly called 
" thrift of time," which brings ripe- 
23 



Time and Place. 

ness of mind within reach of the 
great mass of men and women. The 
man who has learned the value of 
five minutes has gone a long way 
toward making himself a master of 
life and its arts. "The thrift of 
time," says the English statesman, 
cc will repay in after life with a 
usury of profit beyond your most 
sanguine dreams, and waste of it 
will make you dwindle alike in in- 
tellectual and moral stature beyond 
your darkest reckoning." And Mat- 
thew Arnold has put the same truth 
into words which touch the subject 
in hand still more closely : cc The 
plea that this or that man has no 
time for culture will vanish as soon 
as we desire culture so much that we 
begin to examine seriously into our 
present use of time. ,, It is no ex- 
aggeration to say that the mass of 
24 



Time and Place. 

men give to unplanned and desultory 
reading of books and newspapers an 
amount of time which, if intelligently 
and thoughtfully given to the best 
books, would secure, in the long 
run, the best fruits of culture. 

There is no magic about this 
process of enriching one's self by 
absorbing the best books ; it is 
simply a matter of sound habits 
patiently formed and persistently 
kept up. Making the most of one's 
time is the first of these habits ; uti- 
lising the spare hours, the unem- 
ployed minutes, no less than those 
longer periods which the more fortu- 
nate enjoy. To "take time by the 
forelock " in this way, however, one 
one must have his book at hand 
when the precious minute arrives. 
There must be no fumbling for the 
right volume; no waste of time 

25 



Time and Place. 

because one is uncertain what to 
take up next. The waste of oppor- 
tunity which leaves so many people 
intellectually barren who ought to 
be intellectually rich, is due to 
neglect to decide in advance what 
direction one's reading shall take, 
and neglect to keep the book of the 
moment close at hand. The bi- 
ographer of Lucy Larcom tells us 
that the aspiring girl pinned all 
manner of selections of prose and 
verse which she wished to learn at 
the sides of the window beside which 
her loom was placed ; and in this 
way, in the intervals of work, she 
familiarised herself with a great deal 
of good literature. A certain man, 
now widely known, spent his boy- 
hood on a farm, and largely educated 
himself. He learned the rudiments 
of Latin in the evening, and carried 
26 



Time and Place. 

on his study during working hours 
by pinning ten lines from Virgil on 
his plough, — a method of refresh- 
ment much superior to that which 
Homer furnished the ploughman in 
the well-known passage in the de- 
scription of the shield. These are 
extreme cases, but they are capital 
illustrations of the immense power of 
enrichment which is inherent in frag- 
ments of time pieced together by in- 
telligent purpose and persistent habit. 
This faculty of draining all the 
rivulets of knowledge by the way 
was strikingly developed by a man 
of surpassing eloquence and tireless 
activity. He was never a methodical 
student in the sense of following 
rigidly a single line of study, but 
he habitually fed himself with any 
kind of knowledge which was at 
hand. If books were at his elbow, 
27 



Time and Place. 

he read them ; if pictures, engrav- 
ings, gems were within reach, he 
studied them ; if nature was within 
walking distance, he watched nature; 
if men were about him, he learned 
the secrets of their temperaments, 
tastes, and skills ; if he were on ship- 
board, he knew the dialect of the 
vessel in the briefest possible time ; 
if he travelled by stage, he sat with 
the driver and learned all about the 
route, the country, the people, and 
the art of his companion ; if he had 
a spare hour in a village in which 
there was a manufactory, he went 
through it with keen eyes and 
learned the mechanical processes 
used in it. " Shall I tell you the 
secret of the true scholar? " says 
Emerson. " It is this : every man 
I meet is my master in some point, 
and in that I learn of him." 
28 



Time and Place. 

The man who is bent on getting 
the most out of life in order that he 
may make his own nature rich and 
productive will learn to free himself 
largely from dependence on condi- 
tions. The power of concentration 
which issues from a resolute purpose, 
and is confirmed by habits formed to 
give that purpose effectiveness, is of 
more value than undisturbed hours 
and the solitude of a library; it is of 
more value because it takes the place 
of things which cannot always be at 
command. To learn how to treat 
the odds and ends of hours so that 
they constitute, for practical pur- 
poses, an unbroken duration of time, 
is to emancipate one's self from de- 
pendence on particular times, and to 
appropriate all time to one's use ; and 
in like manner to accustom one's self 
to make use of all places, however 
29 



Time and Place. 

thronged and public, as if they were 
private and secluded, is to free one's 
self from bondage to a particular 
locality, or to surroundings specially 
chosen for the purpose. Those who 
have abundance of leisure to spend 
in their libraries are beyond the need 
of suggestions as to the use of time 
and place ; but those whose culture 
must be secured incidentally, as it 
were, need not despair, — they have 
shining examples of successful use 
of limited opportunities about them. 
It is not only possible to make all 
time enrich us, but to use all space 
as if it were our own. To have a 
book in one's pocket and the power 
of fastening one's mind upon it to 
the exclusion of every other object 
or interest is to be independent of 
the library, with its unbroken quiet- 
ness. It is to carry the library with 
30 



Time and Place. 

us, — not only the book, but the 
repose. 

One bright June morning a young 
man, who happened to be waiting at 
a rural station to take a train, dis- 
covered one of the foremost of 
American writers, who was, all 
things considered, perhaps the most 
richly cultivated man whom the 
country has yet produced, sitting on 
the steps intent upon a book, and 
entirely oblivious of his surround- 
ings. The young man's reverence 
for the poet and critic filled him with 
desire to know what book had such 
power of beguiling into forgetfulness 
one of the noblest minds of the time. 
He affirmed within himself that it 
must be a novel. He ventured to 
approach near enough to read the 
title, holding, rightly enough, that a 
book is not personal property, and 
3 1 



Time and Place. 

that his act involved no violation 
of privacy. He discovered that the 
great man was reading a Greek play 
with such relish and abandon that he 
had turned a railway station into a 
private library ! One of the fore- 
most of American novelists, a man 
of real literary insight and of genuine 
charm of style, says that he can write 
as comfortably on a trunk in a room 
at a hotel, waiting to be called for a 
train, as in his own library. There 
is a good deal of discipline behind 
such a power of concentration as that 
illustrated in both these cases ; but 
it is a power which can be culti- 
vated by any man or woman of reso- 
lution. Once acquired, the exercise 
of it becomes both easy and delight- 
ful. It transforms travel, waiting, 
and dreary surroundings into one 
rich opportunity. The man who 
32 



Time and Place. 

has the cc Tempest " in his pocket, 
and can surrender himself to its spell, 
can afford to lose time on cars, fer- 
ries, and at out-of-the-way stations ; 
for the world has become an exten- 
sion of his library, and wherever he 
is, he is at home with his purpose 
and himself. 



33 



Chapter III. 
Meditation and Imagination. 

'TPHERE is a book in the British 
Museum which would have, for 
many people, a greater value than 
any other single volume in the 
world ; it is a copy of Florio's trans- 
lation of Montaigne, and it bears 
Shakespeare's autograph on a fly- 
leaf. There are other books which 
must have had the same ownership ; 
among them were Holinshed's 
cc Chronicles " and North's trans- 
lation of Plutarch. Shakespeare 
would have laid posterity under still 
greater obligations, if that were pos- 
sible, if in some autobiographic 
34 



Meditation and Imagination. 

mood he had told us how he read 
these books ; for never, surely, were 
books read with greater insight and 
with more complete absorption. 
Indeed, the fruits of this reading 
were so rich and ripe that the books 
from which their juices came seem 
but dry husks and shells in compar- 
ison. The reader drained the writer 
dry of every particle of suggestive- 
ness, and then recreated the material 
in new and imperishable forms. The 
process of reproduction was individ- 
ual, and is not to be shared by 
others ; it was the expression of that 
rare and inexplicable personal energy 
which we call genius ; but the process 
of absorption may be shared by all 
who care to submit to the discipline 
which it involves. It is clear that 
Shakespeare read in such a way as to 
possess what he read ; he not only 
35 



Meditation and Imagination. 

remembered it, but he incorporated 
it into himself. No other kind of 
reading could have brought the East 
out of its grave, with its rich and 
languorous atmosphere steeping the 
senses in the charm of Cleopatra, or 
recalled the massive and powerfully 
organised life of Rome about the 
person of the great Caesar. Shake- 
speare read his books with such in- 
sight and imagination that they 
became part of himself; and so far 
as this process is concerned, the 
reader of to-day can follow in his 
steps. 

The majority of people have not 
learned this secret ; they read for in- 
formation or for refreshment ; they 
do not read for enrichment. Feed- 
ing one's nature at all the sources of 
life, browsing at will on all the up- 
lands of knowledge and thought, do 
36 



Meditation and Imagination. 

not bear the fruit of acquirement 
only ; they put us into personal pos- 
session of the vitality, the truth, and 
the beauty about us. A man may 
know the plays of Shakespeare accu- 
rately as regards their order, form, 
construction, and language, and yet 
remain almost without knowledge of 
what Shakespeare was at heart, and 
of his significance in the history of 
the human soul. It is this deeper 
knowledge, however, which is essen- 
tial for culture ; for culture is such 
an appropriation of knowledge that 
it becomes a part of ourselves. It 
is no longer something added by the 
memory ; it is something possessed 
by the soul. A pedant is formed by 
his memory ; a man of culture is 
formed by the habit of meditation, 
and by the constant use of the ima- 
gination. An alert and curious man 
37 



Meditation and Imagination. 

goes through the world taking note 
of all that passes under his eyes, and 
collects a great mass of information, 
which is in no sense incorporated 
into his own mind, but remains a 
definite territory outside his own 
nature, which he has annexed. A 
man of receptive mind and heart, on 
the other hand, meditating on what 
he sees, and getting at its meaning 
by the divining-rod of the imagina- 
tion, discovers the law behind the 
phenomena, the truth behind the 
fact, the vital force which flows 
through all things, and gives them 
their significance. The first man 
gains information; the second gains 
culture. The pedant pours out an 
endless succession of facts with a 
monotonous uniformity of emphasis, 
and exhausts while he instructs ,• the 
man of culture gives us a few facts, 
38 



Meditation and Imagination. 

luminous in their relation to one 
another, and freshens and stimulates 
by bringing us into contact with 
ideas and with life. 

To get at the heart of books we 
must live with and in them ; we 
must make them our constant com- 
panions ; we must turn them over 
and over in thought, slowly pene- 
trating their innermost meaning; 
and when we possess their thought 
we must work it into our own 
thought. The reading of a real 
book ought to be an event in one's 
history ; it ought to enlarge the 
vision, deepen the base of convic- 
tion, and add to the reader what- 
ever knowledge, insight, beauty, and 
power it contains. It is possible to 
spend years of study on what may 
be called the externals of the " Divine 
Comedy/' and remain unaffected in 
39 



Meditation and Imagination. 

nature by this contact with one of 
the masterpieces of the spirit of man 
as well as of the art of literature. It 
is also possible to so absorb Dante's 
thought and so saturate one's self 
with the life of the poem as to add 
to one's individual capital of thought 
and experience all that the poet dis- 
cerned in that deep heart of his 
and wrought out of that intense and 
tragic experience. But this perma- 
nent and personal possession can be 
acquired by those alone who brood 
over the poem and recreate it within 
themselves by the play of the ima- 
gination upon it. A visitor was 
shown into Mr. Lowell's room one 
evening not many years ago, and 
found him barricaded behind rows 
of open books; they covered the 
table and were spread out on the 
floor in an irregular but magic circle. 
40 



Meditation and Imagination. 

" Still studying Dante ? " said the 
intruder into the workshop of as 
true a man of culture as we have 
known on this continent. " Yes," 
was the prompt reply; " always 
studying Dante." 

A man's intellectual character is 
determined by what he habitually 
thinks about. The mind cannot 
always be consciously directed to 
definite ends ; it has hours of relax- 
ation. There are many hours in the 
life of the most strenuous and ardu- 
ous man when the mind goes its own 
way and thinks its own thoughts. 
These times of relaxation, when the 
mind follows its own bent, are per- 
haps the most fruitful and significant 
periods in a rich and noble intellec- 
tual life. The real nature, the deeper 
instincts of the man, come out in 
these moments, as essential refine- 
4 1 



Meditation and Imagination. 

ment and genuine breeding are re- 
vealed when the man is off guard 
and acts and speaks instinctively. 
It is possible to be mentally active 
and intellectually poor and sterile; 
to drive the mind along certain 
courses of work, but to have no 
deep life of thought behind these 
calculated activities. The life of the 
mind is rich and fruitful only when 
thought, released from specific tasks, 
flies at once to great themes as its 
natural objects of interest and love, 
its natural sources of refreshment 
and strength. Under all our defi- 
nite activities there runs a stream of 
meditation ; and the character of that 
meditation determines our wealth or 
our poverty, our productiveness or 
our sterility. 

This instinctive action of the 
mind, although largely unconscious, 
42 



Meditation and Imagination. 

is by no means irresponsible ; it may 
be directed and controlled ; it may 
be turned, by such control, into a 
Pactolian stream, enriching us while 
we rest and ennobling us while we 
play. For the mind may be trained 
to meditate on great themes instead 
of giving itself up to idle reverie ; 
when it is released from work it may 
concern itself with the highest things 
as readily as with those which are 
insignificant and paltry. Whoever 
can command his meditations in the 
streets, along the country roads, on 
the train, in the hours of relaxation, 
can enrich himself for all time with- 
out effort or fatigue ; for it is as 
easy and restful to think about great 
things as about small ones. A cer- 
tain lover of books made this dis- 
covery years ago, and has turned it 
to account with great profit to him- 
43 



Meditation and Imagination. 

self. He thought he discovered in 
the faces of certain great writers a 
meditative quality full of repose and 
suggestive of a constant companion- 
ship with the highest themes. It 
seemed to him that these thinkers, 
who had done so much to liberate 
his own thought, must have dwelt 
habitually with noble ideas ; that in 
every leisure hour they must have 
turned instinctively to those deep 
things which concern most closely 
the life of men. The vast majority 
of men are so absorbed in dealing 
with material that they appear to be 
untouched by the general questions 
of life ; but these general questions 
are the habitual concern of the men 
who think. In such men the mind, 
released from specific tasks, turns at 
once and by preference to these great 
themes, and by quiet meditation 
44 



Meditation and Imagination. 

feeds and enriches the very soul of 
the thinker. And the quality of this 
meditation determines whether the 
nature shall be productive or sterile ; 
whether a man shall be merely a 
logician, or a creative force in the 
world. Following this hint, this 
lover of books persistently trained 
himself, in his leisure hours, to think 
over the books he was reading ; to 
meditate on particular passages, and, 
in the case of dramas and novels, 
to look at characters from different 
sides. It was not easy at first, and 
it was distinctively work ; but it be- 
came instinctive at last, and conse- 
quently it became play. The stream 
of thought, once set in a given direc- 
tion, flows now of its own gravita- 
tion ; and reverie, instead of being 
idle and meaningless, has become rich 
and fruitful. If one subjects cc The 
45 



Meditation and Imagination. 

Tempest/' for instance, to this pro- 
cess, he soon learns it by heart ; first 
he feels its beauty ; then he gets what- 
ever definite information there is in 
it; as he reflects, its constructive 
unity grows clear to him, and he 
sees its quality as a piece of art ; and 
finally its rich and noble disclosure 
of the poet's conception of life grows 
upon him until the play belongs to 
him almost as much as it belonged 
to Shakespeare. This process of 
meditation habitually brought to 
bear on one's reading lays bare the 
very heart of the book in hand, 
and puts one in complete possession 
of it. 

This process of meditation, if it is 
to bear its richest fruit, must be ac- 
companied by a constant play of the 
imagination, than which there is no 
faculty more readily cultivated or 
46 ' 



Meditation and Imagination. 

more constantly neglected. Some 
readers see only a flat surface as they 
read ; others find the book a door 
into a real world, and forget that 
they are dealing with a book. The 
real readers get beyond the book, into 
the life which it describes. They 
see the island in "The Tempest;" 
they hear the tumult of the storm ; 
they mingle with the little company 
who, on that magical stage, reflect 
all the passions of men and are 
brought under the spell of the high- 
est powers of man's spirit. It is a 
significant fact that in the lives of 
men of genius the reading of two or 
three books has often provoked an 
immediate and striking expansion 
of thought and power. Samuel 
Johnson, a clumsy boy in his father's 
bookshop, searching for apples, came 
upon Petrarch, and was destined 
47 



Meditation and Imagination. 

henceforth to be a man of letters, 
John Keats, apprenticed to an apothe- 
cary, read Spenser's "Epithalamium" 
one golden afternoon in company 
with his friend, Cowden Clarke, and 
from that hour was a poet by the 
grace of God. In both cases the 
readers read with the imagination, 
or their own natures would not have 
kindled with so sudden a flash. The 
torch is passed on to those only 
whose hands are outstretched to re- 
ceive it. To read with the imagina- 
tion, one must take time to let the 
figures reform in his own mind ; 
he must see them with great distinct- 
ness and realise them with great 
definiteness. Benjamin Franklin 
tells us, in that Autobiography 
which was one of our earliest and 
remains one of our most genuine 
pieces of writing, that when he dis- 
48 



Meditation and Imagination. 

covered his need of a larger vocabu- 
lary he took some of the tales which 
he found in an odd volume of the 
"Spectator'' and turned them into 
verse; "and after a time, when I 
had pretty well forgotten the prose, 
turned them back again. I also 
sometimes jumbled my collections 
of hints into confusion, and after 
some weeks endeavoured to reduce 
them into the best order before I 
began to form the full sentences and 
compleat the paper." Such a patient 
recasting of material for the ends of 
verbal exactness and accuracy sug- 
gests ways in which the imagination 
may deal with characters and scenes 
in order to stimulate and foster its 
own activity. It is well to recall at 
frequent intervals the story we read 
in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, 

in order that the imagination may 
4 49 



Meditation and Imagination, 

set it before us again in all its rich 
vitality. It is well also as we read 
to insist on seeing the picture as 
well as the words. It is as easy to 
see the bloodless duke before the 
portrait of " My Last Duchess," 
in Browning's little masterpiece, to 
take in all the accessories and carry 
away with us a vivid and lasting im- 
pression, as it is to follow with the 
eye the succession of words. In 
this way we possess the poem, and 
make it serve the ends of culture. 



5° 



Chapter IV. 
The First Delight. 



<c 



^[/'E were reading Plato's Apol- 
ogy in the Sixth Form," 
says Mr. Symonds in his account 
of his school life at Harrow. " I 
bought Cary's crib, and took it with 
me to London on an exeat in March. 
My hostess, a Mrs. Bain, who lived 
in Regent's Park, treated me to a 
comedy one evening at the Hay- 
market. I forget what the play 
was. When we returned from the 
play I went to bed and began to 
read my Cary's Plato. It so hap- 
pened that I stumbled on the ' Phae- 
drus.' I read on and on, till I reached 
5i 



The First Delight. 

the end. Then I began the c Sym- 
posium ; ' and the sun was shining on 
the shrubs outside the ground floor 
on which I slept before I shut the 
book up. I have related these un- 
important details because that night 
was one of the most important 
nights of my life. . . . Here in the 
€ Phsedrus ' and the c Symposium/ in 
the c Myth of the Soul/ I discovered 
the revelation I had been waiting for, 
the consecration of a long-cherished 
idealism. It was just as though the 
voice of my own soul spoke to me 
through Plato. Harrow vanished 
into unreality. I had touched solid 
ground. Here was the poetry, the 
philosophy of my own enthusiasm, 
expressed with all the magic of un- 
rivalled style." The experience re- 
corded in these words is typical ; it 
comes to every one who has the 
52 



The First Delight. 

capacity for the highest form of en- 
joyment and the highest kind of 
growth. It was an experience which 
was both emotional and spiritual ; 
delight and expansion were involved 
in it; the joy of contact with some- 
thing beautiful, and the sudden en- 
largement which comes from touch 
with a great nature dealing with 
fundamental truth. In every expe- 
rience of this kind there comes an 
access of life, as if one had drunk at 
a fountain of vitality. 

A thrilling chapter in the spiritual 
history of the race might be written 
by bringing together the reports of 
such experiences which are to be 
found in almost all literatures, — ex- 
periences which vary greatly in depth 
and significance, which have in 
common the unfailing interest of 
discovery and growth. If this col- 
53 



The First Delight. 

location of vital contacts could be 
expanded so as to include the history 
of the intellectual commerce of races, 
we should be able to read the story 
of humanity in a new and searching 
light. For the transmission of Greek 
thought and beauty to the Oriental 
world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew 
ideas of man and his life, the contact 
of the modern with the antique world 
in the Renaissance, for instance, ef- 
fected changes in the spiritual consti- 
tution of man more subtle, pervasive, 
and radical than we are yet in a posi- 
tion to understand. The spiritual 
history of men is largely a history 
of discovery, — the record of those 
fruitful moments when we come 
upon new things, and our ideas are 
swiftly or slowly expanded to in- 
clude them. That process is gen- 
erally both rapid and continuous ; 
54 



The First Delight. 

the discovery of this continent made 
an instant and striking impression 
on the older world, but that older 
world has not yet entirely adjusted 
itself to the changes in the social 
order which were to follow close 
upon the rising of the new world 
above the once mysterious line of 
the western horizon. 

Now, this process of discovery goes 
on continuously in the experience of 
every human soul which has capacity 
for growth ; and it is the peculiar joy 
of the lover of books. Literature is 
a continual revelation to every genu- 
ine reader ; a revelation of that qual- 
ity which we call art, and a revelation 
of that mysterious vital force which 
we call life. In this double disclos- 
ure literature shares with all art a 
function which ranges it with the 
greatest resources of the spirit ; and 
55 



The First Delight. 

the reader who has the trained vision 
has the constant joy of discovery : 
first, of beauty and power ; next, of 
that concrete or vital form of truth 
which is one with life. One who 
studies books is in constant peril of 
losing the charm of the first by per- 
mitting himself to be absorbed in 
the interest of the second discovery. 
When one has begun to see the range 
and veracity of literature as a disclos- 
ure of the soul and life of man, the 
definite literary quality sometimes 
becomes of secondary importance. 
In academic teaching the study of 
philology, of grammar, of construc- 
tion, of literary history, has often 
been mistaken or substituted for the 
study of literature ; and in private 
study the peculiar enrichment which 
comes from art simply as art is often 
needlessly sacrificed by exclusive at- 
56 



The First Delight. 

tention to books as documents of 
spiritual history. 

It must not be forgotten that books 
become literature by virtue of a cer- 
tain quality which is diffused through 
every true literary work, and which 
separates it at once and forever from 
all other writing. To miss this 
quality, therefore, is to miss the 
very essence of the thing with which 
we are in contact ; to treat the inspired 
books as if they were uninspired. 
The first discovery which the real 
reader makes is the perception of 
some new and individual beauty or 
power ; the discovery of life and 
truth is secondary in order of time, 
and depends in no small measure 
on the sensitiveness of the spirit 
to the first and obvious charm. If 
one wishes to study the life — not 
the mere structure — of an apple- 
57 



The First Delight. 

tree in bloom, he must surrender 
himself at the start to the bloom and 
fragrance ; for these are not mere 
external phases of the growth of the 
tree, — they are most delicate and 
characteristic disclosures of its life. 
In like manner he who would mas- 
ter lc As You Like It" must give 
himself up in the first place to its 
wonderful and significant beauty. 
For this lovely piece of literature 
is a revelation in its art quite as 
definitely as in its thought ; and the 
first care of the reader must be to 
feel the deep and lasting charm con- 
tained in the play. In that charm 
resides something which may be 
transmitted, and the reception of 
which is always a step in culture. 

To feel freshly and deeply is not 
only a characteristic of the artist, but 
also of the reader ; the first finds de- 
58 



The First Delight. 

light in creation, the second finds 
delight in discovery between them 
they divide one of the greatest joys 
known to men. Wagner somewhere 
says that the greatest joy possible to 
man is the putting forth of creative 
activity so spontaneously that the 
critical faculty is, for the time being, 
asleep. The purest joy known to 
the reader is a perception of the 
beauty and power of a work of art 
so fresh and instantaneous that it 
completely absorbs the whole nature. 
Analysis, criticism, and judicial ap- 
praisement come later ; the first 
moment must be surrendered to the 
joy of discovery. 

Heine has recorded the overpow- 
ering impression made upon him by 
the first glimpse of the Venus of 
Melos. An experience so extreme 
in emotional quality could come only 
59 



The First Delight. 

to a nature singularly sensitive to 
beauty and abnormally sensitive to 
physical emotion ; but he who has 
no power of feeling intensely the 
power of beauty in the moment 
of discovery, has missed something 
of very high value in the process of 
culture. One of the signs of real 
culture is the power of enjoyment 
which goes with fresh feeling. All 
great art is full of this feeling; its 
characteristic is the new interest with 
which it invests the most familiar 
objects ; and one evidence of capacity 
to receive culture from art is the 
development of this feeling. The 
reader who is on the way to enrich 
himself by contact with books culti- 
vates the power of feeling freshly and 
keenly the charm of every book he 
reads simply as a piece of litera- 
ture. One may destroy this power 
60 



The First Delight. 

by permitting analysis and criticism 
to become the primary mood, or one 
may develop it by resolutely putting 
analysis and criticism into the secon- 
dary place, and sedulously develop- 
ing the power to enjoy for the sake 
of enjoyment. The reader who does 
not feel the immediate and obvious 
beauty of a poem or a play has lost 
the power, not only of getting the full 
effect of a work of art, but of getting 
its full significance as well. The sur- 
prise, the delight, the joy of the first 
discovery are not merely pleasurable ; 
they are in the highest degree educa- 
tional. They reveal the sensitive- 
ness of the nature to those ultimate 
forms of beauty and power which art 
takes on, and its power of respond- 
ing not only to what is obviously 
beautiful but is also profoundly true. 
For the harmonious and noble beauty 
61 



The First Delight. 

of "As You Like It" is not only 
obvious and external ; it is wrought 
into its structure so completely that, 
like the blossom of the apple, it is 
the effluence of the life of the play. 
To get delight out of reading is, 
therefore, the first and constant care 
of the reader who wishes to be en- 
riched by vital contact with the most 
inclusive and expressive of the arts. 



62 



Chapter V. 

The Feeling for Literature. 

HP HE importance of reading habit- 
ually the best books becomes 
apparent when one remembers that 
taste depends very largely on the 
standards with which we are familiar, 
and that the ability to enjoy the best 
and only the best is conditioned upon 
intimate acquaintance with the best. 
The man who is thrown into constant 
association with inferior work either 
revolts against his surroundings or 
suffers a disintegration of aim and 
standard, which perceptibly lowers 
the plane on which he lives. In 
either case the power of enjoyment 
63 



The Feeling; for Literature. 



o 



from contact with a genuine piece of 
creative work is sensibly diminished, 
and may be finally lost. The deli- 
cacy of the mind is both precious and 
perishable ; it can be preserved onlv 
by associations which confirm and 
satisfy it. For this reason, among 
others, the best books are the only 
books which a man bent on culture 
should read ; inferior books not only 
waste his time, but they dull the edge 
of his perception and diminish his 
capacity for delight. 

This delight, born afresh of every 
new contact of the mind with a real 
book, furnishes indubitable evidence 
that the reader has the feeling for 
literature, — a possession much rarer 
than is commonly supposed. It is 
no injustice to say that the majority 
of those who read have no feeling for 
literature; their interest is awakened 
64 



The Feeling for Literature. 

or sustained not by the literary quality 
of a book, but by some element of 
brightness or novelty, or by the charm 
of narrative. Reading which finds its 
reward in these things is entirely legi- 
timate, but it is not the kind of read- 
ing which secures culture. It adds 
largely to one's stock of information, 
and it refreshes the mind by intro- 
ducing new objects of interest; but it 
does not minister directly to the re- 
fining and maturing of the nature. 
The same book may be read in en- 
tirely different ways and with entirely 
different results. One may, for in- 
stance, read Shakespeare's historical 
plays simply for the story element 
which runs through them, and for 
the interest which the skilful use of 
that element excites ; and in such a 
reading there will be distinct gain for 
the reader. This is the way in which 
5 65 



The Feeling for Literature. 

a healthy boy generally reads these 
plays for the first time. From such 
a reading one will get information and 
refreshment ; more than one English 
statesman has confessed that he owed 
his knowledge of certain periods of 
English history largely to Shakes- 
peare. On the other hand, one may 
read these plays for the joy of the 
art that is in them, and for the 
enrichment which comes from con- 
tact with the deep and tumultuous 
life which throbs through them ; and 
this is the kind of reading which 
produces culture, the reading which 
means enlargement and ripening. 

The feeling for literature, like the 
feeling for art in general, is not only 
susceptible of cultivation, but very 
quickly responds to appeals which 
are made to it by noble or beautiful 
objects. It is essentially a feeling, 
66 



The Feeling for Literature. 



b 



but it is a feeling which depends 
very largely on intelligence ; it is 
strengthened and made sensitive and 
responsive by constant contact with 
those objects which call it out. No 
rules can be laid down for its de- 
velopment save the very simple rule 
to read only and always those books 
which are literature. It is impossible 
to give specific directions for the culti- 
vation of the feeling for Nature. It 
is not to be gotten out of text-books 
of any kind ; it is not to be found in 
botanies or geologies or works on zo- 
ology ; it is to be gotten only out of 
familiarity with Nature herself. Daily 
fellowship with landscapes, trees, skies, 
birds, with an open mind and in a re- 
ceptive mood, soon develops in one a 
kind of spiritual sense which takes cog- 
nisance of things not seen before and 
adds a new joy and resource to life. 
67 



The Feeling for Literature. 

In like manner the feeling for literature 
is quickened and nourished by intimate 
acquaintance with books of beauty and 
power. Such an intimacy makes the 
sense of delight more keen, preserves 
it against influences which tend to 
deaden it, and makes the taste more 
sure and trustworthy. A man who 
has long had acquaintance with the 
best in any department of art comes 
to have, almost unconsciously to him- 
self, an instinctive power of discerning 
good work from bad, of recognising 
on the instant the sound and true 
method and style, and of feeling a 
fresh and constant delight in such 
work. His education comes not by 
didactic, but by vital methods. 

The art quality in a book is as 
difficult to analyse as the feeling for 
it ; not because it is intangible or in- 
definite, but because it is so subtly 
68 



The Feeling for Literature. 



t> 



diffused. It is difficult to analyse 
because it is the breath of life in the 
book, and life always evades us, no 
matter how keen and exhaustive our 
search may be. Most of us are so 
entirely out of touch with the spirit 
of art in this busy new world that we 
are not quite convinced of its reality. 
We know that it is decorative, and 
that a certain pleasure flows from it ; 
but we are sceptical of its significance 
in the life of the race, of its deep 
necessity in the development of that 
life, and of its supreme educational 
value. And our scepticism, it must 
be frankly said, like most scepticism, 
grows out of our ignorance. True 
art has nothing in common with the 
popular conception of its nature and 
uses. Instead of being decorative, 
it is organic ; when men arrive at a 
certain stage of ripeness and power 
69 



The Feeling for Literature 

they express themselves through its 
forms as naturally as the tree puts 
forth its flowers. Nothing which lies 
within the range of human achieve- 
ment is more real or inevitable. 
This expression is neither mechanical 
nor artificial ; it is made under certain 
inflexible laws, but they are the laws 
of the human spirit, not the rules of 
a craft ; they are rooted in that deeper 
psychology which deals with man as 
an organic whole and not as a bundle 
of separate faculties. 

It was once pointed out to Tenny- 
son that he had scrupulously con- 
formed, in a certain poem, to a number 
of rules of versification and to certain 
principles in the use of different sound 
values. " Yes," answered the poet in 
substance, " I carefully observed all 
those rules and was entirely uncon- 
scious of them ! " There was no 
70 



The Feeling for Literature. 

contradiction between the Laureate's 
practice of his craft and the technical 
rules which govern it. The poet's 
instinct kept him in harmony with 
those essential and vital principles of 
language of which the formal rules 
are simply didactic statements. 

Art, it need hardly be said, is never 
artifice ; intelligence and calculation 
enter into the work of the artist, but 
in the last analysis it is the free and 
noble expression of his own personal- 
ity. It expresses what is deepest and 
most significant in him, and expresses 
it in a final rather than a provisional 
form. The secret of the reality and 
power of art lies in the fact that it is 
the culmination and summing up of 
a process of observation, experience, 
and feeling ; it is the deposit of what- 
ever is richest and most enduring in 
the life of a man or a race. It is 
7i 



The Feeling for Literature. 

a finality both of experience and of 
thought ; it contains the ultimate and 
the widest conception of man's nature 
and life, or of the meaning and reality 
of Nature, which an age or a race 
reaches. It is the supreme flowering 
of the genius of a race or an age. It 
has, therefore, the highest educational 
value. For the very highest products 
of man's life in this world are his 
ideas and ideals ; they grow out of his 
highest nature ; they react on his char- 
acter ; they are the precious deposit of 
all that he has thought, felt, suffered, 
and done in word and work, in feeling 
and action. The richest educational 
material upon which modern men are 
nourished are these ultimate conclu- 
sions and convictions of the Hebrew, 
the Greek, and the Roman. These 
ultimate inferences, these final inter- 
pretations of their own natures and of 
72 



The Feeling for Literature. 

the world about them, contain not 
only the thought of these races, but 
their life as well. They have, there- 
fore, a vital quality which not only 
assures their own immortality, but 
has the power of transmission to 
others. These ultimate results of 
experience are embodied in art, and 
especially in literature ; and that which 
makes them art is this very vitality. 
For this reason art is absolutely es- 
sential for culture ; it has the power 
of enriching and expanding the na- 
tures which come in contact with it 
by transmitting to them the highest 
results of the life of the past, by 
sharing with them the ripeness and 
maturity of the human spirit in its 
universal experience. 



73 



Chapter VI. 
The Books of Life. 

HP HE books of power, as dis- 
tinguished from the books of 
knowledge, include the original, cre- 
ative, first-hand books in all litera- 
tures, and constitute, in the last anal- 
ysis, a comparatively small group, 
with which any student can thor- 
oughly familiarise himself. The lit- 
erary impulse of the race has expressed 
itself in a great variety of works, of 
varying charm and power ; but the 
books which are fountain-heads of 
vitality, ideas, and beauty, are few in 
number. These original and domi- 
nant creations may be called the books 
74 



The Books of Life. 

of life, if one may venture to modify 
De Quincey's well-worn phrase. For 
that which is deepest in this group of 
masterpieces is not power, but some- 
thing greater and more inclusive, of 
which power is but a single form of 
expression, — life ; that quintessence 
of the unbroken experience and ac- 
tivity of the race which includes not 
only thought, power, beauty, and 
every kind of skill, but, below all 
these, the living soul of the living 
man. 

If it be true, as many believe, that 
the fundamental process of the uni- 
verse, so far as we can understand it, 
is not intellectual, but vital, it follows 
that the deepest things which men 
have learned have come to them not 
as the result of processes of thought, 
but as the result of the process of liv- 
ing. It is evident that certain defi- 
75 



The Books of Life. 

nite purposes are being wrought out 
through physical forms, processes, 
and forces ; science reveals clearly- 
enough certain great lines of devel- 
opment. In like manner, although 
with very significant differences, cer- 
tain deep lines of growth and expan- 
sion become more and more clear in 
human history. Through the bare 
process of living, men not only learn 
fundamental facts about themselves 
and their world, but they are evidently 
working out certain purposes. Of 
these purposes they do not, it is true, 
possess full knowledge ; but complete 
knowledge is necessary neither for 
the demonstration of the existence of 
the purpose nor for those ethical and 
intellectual uses which that knowl- 
edge serves. The life of the race is 
a revelation of the nature of man, of 
the character of his relations with his 
76 



The Books of Life. 

surroundings, and of the certain great 
lines of development along which the 
race is moving. Every leading race 
has its characteristic thought concern- 
ing its own nature, its relation to the 
world, and the character and quality 
of life. These various fundamen- 
tal conceptions have shaped all defi- 
nite thinking, and have very largely 
moulded race character, and, there- 
fore, determined race destiny. The 
Hebrew, the Greek, and the Roman 
conceptions of life constitute not only 
the key to the diverse histories of the 
leaders of ancient civilisation, but also 
their most vital contribution to civi- 
lisation. These conceptions were not 
definitely thought out ; they were 
worked out. They were the result 
of the contact of these different peo- 
ples with Nature, with the circum- 
stances of their own time, and with 
77 



The Books of Life, 

those universal experiences which fall 
to the lot of all men, and which are, 
in the long run, the prime sources 
and instruments of human educa- 
tion. 

The interpretations of life which 
each of these races has left us are 
revelations both of race character and 
of life itself; they embody the high- 
est thought, the deepest feeling, the 
most searching experiences, the keen- 
est suffering, the most strenuous ac- 
tivity. In these interpretations are 
expressed and represented the inner 
and essential life of each race ; in 
them the soul of the elder world sur- 
vives. Now, these interpretations 
constitute, in their highest forms, not 
only the supreme art of the world, 
but they are also the richest educa- 
tional material accessible to men. 
Information and discipline may be 
78 



The Books of Life. 

drawn from other sources, but that 
culture which means the enrichment 
and unfolding of a man's self is largely 
developed by familiarity with those 
ultimate conclusions of man about 
himself which are the deposit of all 
that he has thought, suffered, wrought, 
and been, — those deep deposits of 
truth silently formed in the heart of 
the race in the long and painful work- 
ing out of its life, its character, and 
its destiny. For these rich interpre- 
tations we must turn to art, and es- 
pecially to the art of literature ; and 
in literature we must turn especially 
to the small group of works which, 
by reason of the adequacy with which 
they convey and illustrate these in- 
terpretations, hold the first places, — 
the books of life. 

The man who would get the ripest 
culture from books ought to read 
79 



The Books of Life, 

many, but there are a few books 
which he must read; among them, 
first and foremost, are the Bible, and 
the works of Homer, Dante, Shake- 
speare, and Goethe. These are the 
supreme books of life as distinguished 
from the books of knowledge and 
skill. They hold their places because 
they combine in the highest degree 
vitality, truth, power, and beauty. 
They are the central reservoirs into 
which the rivulets of individual ex- 
perience over a vast surface have been 
gathered ; they are the most complete 
revelations of what life has brought 
and has been to the leading races; 
they bring us into contact with the 
heart and soul of humanity. They 
not only convey information, and, 
rightly used, impart discipline, but 
they transmit life. There is a vital- 
ity in them which passes on into the 
80 



The Books of Life. 

nature which is open to receive it. 
They have again and again inspired 
intellectual movements on a wide 
scale, as they are constantly recreating 
individual ideals and aims. What- 
ever view may be held of the author- 
ity of the Bible, it is agreed that its 
power as literature has been incalcu- 
lable by reason of the depth of life 
which it sounds and the range of life 
which it compasses. There is power 
enough in it to revive a decaying age 
or give a new date and a fresh impulse 
to a race which has parted with its 
creative energy. The reappearance 
of the New Testament in Greek, 
after the long reign of the Vulgate, 
contributed mightily to that renewal 
and revival of life which we call the 
Reformation ; while its translation 
into the modern languages liberated a 
moral and intellectual force of which 
6 Si 



The Books of Life. 

no adequate measurement can be 
made. In like manner, though in 
lesser degree, the " Iliad " and " Odys- 
sey/' the " Divine Comedy/' the 
plays of Shakespeare, and " Faust " 
have set new movements in motion 
and have enriched and enlarged the 
lives of races. 

With these books of life every 
man ought to hold the most intimate 
relationship ; they are not to be read 
once and put on the upper shelves of 
the library among those classics which 
establish one's claim to good intel- 
lectual standing, but which silently 
gather the dust of isolation and soli- 
tude ; they are to be always at hand. 
The barrier of language has disap- 
peared so far as they are concerned ; 
they are to be had in many and ad- 
mirable translations ; one evidence of 
their power is afforded by the fact 
82 






The Books of Life. 

that every new age of literary devel- 
opment and every new literary move- 
ment feels compelled to translate them 
afresh. The changes of taste in 
English literature and the notable 
phases through which it has passed 
since the days of the Elizabethans 
might be traced or inferred from the 
successive translations of Homer, 
from the work of Chapman to that 
of Andrew Lang. One needs to read 
many books, to browse in many fields, 
to know the art of many countries ; 
but the books of life ought to form 
the background of every life of 
thought and study. They need not, 
indeed they cannot, be mastered at 
once ; but by reading in them con- 
stantly, for brief or for long intervals, 
one comes to know them familiarly, 
and almost insensibly to gain the en- 
richment and enlargement which they 
S3 



The Books of Life. 

offer. Moreover, they afford tenfold 
greater and more lasting delight, rec- 
reation, and variety than all the works 
of lesser writers. Whoever knows 
them in a real sense knows life, hu- 
manity, art, and himself. 



84 



Chapter VII. 

From the Book to the Reader, 

'"THE study which has found its 
material and its reward in Dante's 
" Divine Comedy " or in Goethe's 
" Faust" is the best possible evidence 
of the inexhaustible interest in the 
masterpieces of these two great poets. 
Libraries of considerable dimensions 
have been written in the way of com- 
mentaries upon, and expositions of, 
their notable works. Many of these 
books are, it is true, deficient in in- 
sight and possessed of very little 
power of interpretation or illumina- 
tion ; they are the products of a bar- 
ren, dry-as-dust industry, which has 
85 



From the Book to the Reader. 

expended itself upon external char- 
acteristics and incidental references. 
Nevertheless, the very volume and 
mass of these secondary books wit- 
ness to the fertility of the first-hand 
books with which they deal, and show 
beyond dispute that men have an in- 
satiable desire to get at their interior 
meanings. If these great poems had 
been mere illustrations of individual 
skill and gift, this interest would have 
long ago exhausted itself. That sin- 
gular and unsurpassed qualities of 
construction, style, and diction are 
present in " Faust " and the " Divine 
Comedy" need not be emphasised, 
since they both belong to the very high- 
est class of literary production ; but 
there is something deeper and more 
vital in them : there is a philosophy or 
interpretation of life. Each of these 
poems is a revelation of what man is 
86 



From the Book to the Reader. 

and of what his life means ; and it is 
this deep truth, or set of truths, at 
the heart of these works which we 
are always striving to reach and 
make clear to ourselves. 

In the case of neither poem did the 
writer content himself with an exposi- 
tion of his own experience ; in both 
cases there is an attempt to embody 
and put in concrete form an immense 
section of universal experience. Nei- 
ther poem could have been written if 
there had not been a long antecedent 
history, rich in every kind and quality 
of human contact with the world, and 
of the working out of the forces which 
are in every human soul. These two 
forms of activity represent in a gene- 
ral way what men have learned about 
themselves and their surroundings ; 
and, taken together, they constitute 
the material out of which interpreta- 
87 



From the Book to the Reader. 

tions and explanations of human life 
have been made. These explanations 
vary according to the genius, the en- 
vironment, and the history of races 
but in every case they represent the 
very soul of race life, for they are the 
spiritual forms in which that life has 
expressed itself. Other forms of race 
activity, however valuable or beauti- 
ful, are lost in the passage of time, 
or are taken up and absorbed, and so 
part with their separate and individ- 
ual existence ; but the quintessence of 
experience and thought expressed in 
great works of art is gathered up and 
preserved, as Milton said, for " a life 
beyond life." 

Now, it is upon this imperishable 
food which the past has stored up 
through the genius of great artists 
that later generations feed and nour- 
ish themselves. It is through inti- 
88 



From the Book to the Reader. 

mate contact with these fundamental 
conceptions, worked out with such 
infinite pain and patience, that the in- 
dividual experience is broadened to 
include the experience of the race. 
This contact is the mystery as it is 
the source of culture. No one can 
explain the transmission of power 
from a book to a reader ; but all his- 
tory bears witness to the fact that 
such transmissions are made. Some- 
times, as during what is called the 
Revival of Learning, the transmission 
is so general and so genuine that the 
life of an entire society is visibly 
quickened and enlarged ; indeed, it 
is not too much to say that an en- 
tire civilisation feels the effect. The 
transmission of power, the transfer- 
ence of vitality, from books to indi- 
viduals are so constant and common 
that they are matters of universal ex- 
89 



From the Book to the Reader. 

perience. Most men of any consid- 
erable culture date the successive en- 
largements of their intellectual lives 
from the reading, at successive periods, 
of the books of insight and power, — 
the books that deal with life at first- 
hand. There are, for instance, few 
men of a certain age who have read 
widely or deeply who do not recall 
with perennial enthusiasm the days 
when Carlyle and Emerson fell into 
their hands. They may have re- 
acted radically from the didactic 
teaching of both writers, but they 
have not lost the impulse, nor have 
they parted with the enlargement of 
thought received in those first raptur- 
ous hours of discovery. There was 
wrought in them then changes of 
view, expansions of nature, a libera- 
tion of life which can never be lost. 
This experience is repeated so long as 
90 



From the Book to the Reader. 

the man retains the power of growth 
and so long as he keeps in contact 
with the great writers. Every such 
contact marks a new stage in the 
process of culture. This means not 
merely the deep satisfaction and de- 
light which are involved in every 
fresh contact with a genuine work of 
art; it means the permanent enrich- 
ment of the reader. He has gained 
something more lasting than pleasure 
and more valuable than information : 
he has gained a new view of life ; he 
has looked again into the heart of 
humanity ; he has felt afresh the su- 
preme interest which always attaches 
to any real contact with the life of the 
race. And all this comes to him not 
only because the life of the race is es- 
sentially dramatic and, therefore, of 
quite inexhaustible interest, but be- 
cause that life is essentially a revela- 
91 



From the Book to the Reader. 

tion. A series of fundamental truths 
is being disclosed through the simple 
process of living, and whoever touches 
the deep life of men in the great 
works of art comes in contact also 
with these fundamental truths. Who- 
ever reads the " Divine Comedy " and 
"Faust" for the first time discovers 
new realms of truth for himself, and 
gains not only the joy of discovery, 
but an immense addition of territory 
as well. 

The most careless and superficial 
readers do not remain untouched by 
the books of life ; they fail to under- 
stand them or get the most out of 
them, but they do not escape the 
spell which they all possess, — the 
power of compelling the attention 
and stirring the heart. Not many 
years ago the stories of the Russian 
novelists were in all hands. That 
92 



From the Book to the Reader. 

the fashion has passed is evident 
enough, and it is also evident that the 
craving for these books was largely 
a fashion. Nevertheless, the fashion 
itself was due to the real power which 
those stories revealed, and which con- 
stitutes their lasting contribution to 
the world's literature. They were 
touched with a profound sadness, 
which was exhaled like a mist by the 
conditions they portrayed ; they were 
full of a sympathy born of knowledge 
and of sorrow ; their roots were in 
the rich soil of the life they described. 
The latest of them, Count Tolstoi's 
" Master and Man," is one of those 
masterpieces which take rank at once, 
not by reason of their magnitude, but 
by reason of a certain beautiful quality 
which comes only to the man whose 
heart is pressed against the heart of 
his theme, and who divines what life 
93 



From the Book to the Reader. 

is in the inarticulate soul of his brother 
man. Such books are the rich mate- 
rial of culture to the man who reads 
them with his heart, because they add 
to his experience a kind of experience 
otherwise inaccessible to him, which 
quickens, refreshes, and broadens his 
own nature. 



94 



Chapter VIII. 
By Way of Illustration. 

'PHE peculiar quality which culture 
imparts is beyond the compre- 
hension of a child, and yet it is some- 
thing so definite and engaging that a 
child may recognise its presence and 
feel its attraction. One of the spe- 
cial pieces of good fortune which fell 
to my boyhood was companionship 
with a man whose note of distinction, 
while not entirely clear to me, threw 
a spell over me. I knew other men 
of greater force and of larger scholar- 
ship ; but no one else gave me such 
an impression of balance, ripeness, and 
fineness of quality. I not only felt a 
95 



By Way of Illustration. 

peculiarly searching influence flowing 
from one who graciously put himself 
on my level of intelligence, but I felt 
also an impulse to emulate a nature 
which satisfied my imagination com- 
pletely. Other men of ability whose 
conversation I heard filled me with 
admiration ; this man made the world 
larger and richer to my boyish thought. 
There was no didacticism on his part ; 
there was, on the contrary, a simplicity 
so great that I felt entirely at home 
with him ; but he was so thoroughly 
a citizen of the world that I caught 
a glimpse of the world in his most 
casual talk. I got a sense of the 
largeness and richness of life from 
him. I did not know what it was 
which laid such hold on my mind, 
but I saw later that it was the remark- 
able culture of the man, — a culture 
made possible by many fortunate con- 
96 



By Way of Illustration. 

ditions of wealth, station, travel, and 
education, and expressing itself in a 
peculiar largeness of vision and sweet- 
ness of spirit. In this man's friend- 
ship I was for the moment lifted out 
of my own crudity into that vast 
movement and experience in which 
all the races have shared. 

I am often reminded of this early 
impulse and enthusiasm, but there are 
occasions when its significance and 
value become especially clear to me. 
It was brought forcibly to my mind 
several years ago by an hour or two 
of talk with one who, as truly as any 
other American, stands as a repre- 
sentative man of culture ; one, that is, 
whose large scholarship has been so 
completely absorbed that it has en- 
riched the very texture of his mind, 
and given him the gift of sharing the 
experience of the race. It was on an 
7 97 



By Way of Illustration. 

evening when a play of Sophocles was 
to be rendered by the students of a 
certain university in which the tradi- 
tion of culture has never wholly died 
out, and I led the talk along the 
lines of the play. I was rewarded by 
an hour of such delight as comes only 
from the best kind of talk, and I felt 
anew the peculiar charm and power 
of culture. For what I got that en- 
riched me and prepared me for real 
comprehension of one of the greatest 
works of art in all literature was not 
information, but atmosphere. I saw 
rising about me the vanished life, 
which the dramatist knew so well that 
its secrets of conviction and tempera- 
ment were all open to him ; in archi- 
tecture, poetry, religion, politics, and 
manners, it was quietly rebuilded 
for me in such wise that my own 
imagination was stirred to meet the 
98 



By Way of Illustration. 

talker half-way, and to fill in the out- 
lines of a picture so swiftly and skil- 
fully sketched. When I went to the 
play I went as a contemporary of its 
writer might have gone. I did not 
need to enter into it, for it had already 
entered into me. A man of scholar- 
ship could have set the period before 
me in a mass of facts ; a man of cul- 
ture alone could give me power to 
share, for an evening at least, its spirit 
and life. 

These personal illustrations will be 
pardoned, because they bring out in 
the most concrete way that special 
quality which marks the possession 
of culture in the deepest sense. That 
quality allies it very closely with genius 
itself, in certain aspects of that rare 
and inexplicable gift. For one of the 
most characteristic qualities of genius 
is its power of divination, of sharing 

99 
.LofC. 



By Way of Illustration. 

alien or diverse experiences. It is 
this peculiar insight which puts the 
great dramatists in possession of the 
secrets of so many temperaments, 
the springs of so many different per- 
sonalities, the atmosphere of such re- 
mote periods of time, — which, in a 
way, gives them power to make the 
dead live again ; for Shakespeare can 
stand at the tomb of Cleopatra and 
evoke not the shade, but the passion- 
ate woman herself out of the dust in 
which she sleeps. There has been, 
perhaps, no more luminous example 
of the faculty of sharing the experi- 
ence of a past age, of entering into 
the thought and feeling of a vanished 
race, than the peculiar divination and 
rehabilitation of certain extinct phases 
of emotion and thought which one 
finds in the pages of Walter Pater. 
In those pages there are, it is true, 
ioo 



By Way of Illustration. 

occasional lapses from a perfectly 
sound method ; there is at times a 
loss of simplicity, a cloying sweet- 
ness in the style of this accomplished 
writer. These are, however, the perils 
of a very sensitive temperament, an 
intense feeling for beauty, and a cer- 
tain seclusion from the affairs of life. 
That which characterises Mr. Pater 
at all times is his power of putting 
himself amid conditions that are not 
only extinct, but obscure and elusive ; » 
of winding himself back, as it were, 
into the primitive Greek conscious- 
ness and recovering for the moment 
the world as the Greeks saw, or, 
rather, felt it. It is an easy matter to 
mass the facts about any given period ; 
it is a very different and a very diffi- 
cult matter to set those facts in vital 
relations to each other, to see them 
in true prospective. And the difficul- 

IOI 



By Way of Illustration. 

ties are immensely increased when the 
period is not only remote, but defi- 
cient in definite registry of thought 
and feeling ; when the record of what 
it believed and felt does not exist by 
itself, but must be deciphered from 
those works of art in which is pre- 
served the final form of thought and 
feeling, and in which are gathered 
and merged a great mass of ideas 
and emotions. 

This is especially true of the more 
subtle and elusive Greek myths, which 
were in no case creations of the in- 
dividual imagination or of definite 
periods of time, but which were fed 
by many tributaries, very slowly tak- 
ing shape out of general but shadowy 
impressions, widely diffused but vague 
ideas, deeply felt but obscure emo- 
tions. To get at the heart of one of 
these stories one must be able not only 

102 



By Way of Illustration. 

to enter into the thought of the un- 
known poets who made their contri- 
butions to the myth, but must also 
be able to disentangle the threads of 
idea and feeling so deftly woven to- 
gether, and follow each back to its 
shadowy beginning. To do this, one 
must have not only knowledge, but 
sympathy and imagination, — those 
closely related qualities which get at 
the soul of knowledge and make it 
live again ; those qualities which the 
man of culture shares in no small 
measure with the man of genius. In 
his studies of such myths as those 
which gather about Dionysius and 
Demeter this is precisely what Mr. 
Pater did. He not only marked out 
distinctly the courses of the main 
streams, but he followed back the 
rivulets to their fountain-heads ; he 
not only mastered the thought of an 
103 



By Way of Illustration. 

extinct people, but, what is much 
more difficult, he put off his knowl- 
edge and put on their ignorance ; he 
not only entered into their thought 
about the world of nature which sur- 
rounded them, but he entered into 
their feeling about it. Very lightly 
touched and charming is, for instance, 
his description of the habits and haunts 
and worship of Demeter, the current 
impressions of her service and place 
in the life of the world : — 

" Demeter haunts the fields in spring, 
when the young lambs are dropped ; she 
visits the barns in autumn ; she takes part 
in mowing and binding up the corn, and 
is the goddess of sheaves. She presides 
over the pleasant, significant details of the 
farm, the threshing-floor, and the full gran- 
ary, and stands beside the woman baking 
bread at the oven. With these fancies are 
connected certain simple rites, the half- 
104 



By Way of Illustration. 

understood local observance and the half- 
believed local legend reacting capriciously 
on each other. They leave her a fragment 
of bread and a morsel of meat at the cross- 
roads to take on her journey ; and perhaps 
some real Demeter carries them away, as 
she wanders through the country. The 
incidents of their yearly labour become to 
them acts of worship ; they seek her bless- 
ing through many expressive names, and 
almost catch sight of her at dawn or even- 
ing, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. 
She lays a finger on the grass at the road- 
side, and some new flower comes up. All 
the picturesque implements of country life 
are hers ; the poppy also, emblem of an 
exhaustless fertility, and full of mysterious 
juices for the alleviation of pain. The 
country-woman who puts her child to 
sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for 
winnowing the corn remembers Demeter 
Kourotrophos, the mother of corn and 
children alike, and makes it a little coat 
out of the dress worn by its father at his 
105 



By Way of Illustration. 

initiation into her mysteries. . . . She lies 
on the ground out-of-doors on summer 
nights, and becomes wet with the dew. 
She grows young again every spring, yet is 
of great age, the wrinkled woman of the 
Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of 
Demophoon." 

This bit of description moves with 
so light a foot that one forgets, as true 
art always makes one forget, the mass 
of hard and scattered materials which 
lie back of it, materials which would 
not have yielded their secret of unity 
and vitality save to imagination and 
sympathy; to knowledge which has 
ripened into culture. But the recov- 
ery of such a story, the reconstruc- 
tion of such a figure, are not af- 
fected by description alone ; one must 
penetrate to the heart of the myth, 
and master the significance of the 
woman transformed by idealisation 
106 



By Way of Illustration. 

into a beneficent and much labouring 
goddess. We must go with Mr. 
Pater a step farther if we would under- 
stand how a man of culture divines 
the deeper experiences of an alien 
race : — 

" Three profound ethical conceptions, 
three impressive sacred figures, have now 
defined themselves for the Greek imagina- 
tion, condensed from all the traditions 
which have now been traced, from the 
hymns of the poets, from the instinctive 
and unformulated mysticism of primitive 
minds. Demeter is become the divine, 
sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of 
summer, is become Persephone, the goddess 
of death, still associated with the forms and 
odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one risen 
from the dead also, presenting one side of 
her ambiguous nature to men's gloomier 
fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of 
Demeter enthroned, chastened by sorrow, 
and somewhat advanced in age, blessing 
107 



By Way of Illustration. 

the earth in her joy at the return of Kore. 
The myth has now entered upon the third 
phase of its life, in which it becomes the 
property of those more elevated spirits, 
who, in the decline of the Greek religion, 
pick and choose and modify, with perfect 
freedom of mind, whatever in it may seem 
adapted to minister to their culture. In 
this way the myths of the Greek religion 
become parts of an ideal, visible embodi- 
ments of the susceptibilities and intentions 
of the nobler kind of souls ; and it is to 
this latest phase of mythological develop- 
ment that the highest Greek sculpture 
allies itself." 

This illustration of the divination 
by which the man of culture possesses 
himself of a half-forgotten and ob- 
scurely recorded experience and re- 
habilitates and interprets it, is so 
complete that it makes amplification 
superfluous. 

1 08 



Chapter IX. 

Personality. 

" TT is undeniable," says Matthew 
Arnold, "that the exercise of 
a creative power, that a free creative 
activity is the highest function of man ; 
it is proved to be so by man's finding 
in it his true happiness." If this be 
true, and the heart of man apart from 
all testimony affirms it, then the great 
books not only embody and express 
the genius and vital knowledge of the 
race which created them, but they are 
the products of the highest activity of 
man in the finest moments of jiis life. > 
They represent a high felicity no less 
than a noble gift ; they are the memo- 
109 



Personality. 

rials of a happiness which may have 
been brief, but which, while it lasted, 
had a touch of the divine in it ; for 
men are never nearer divinity than in 
their creative impulses and moments. 
Homer may have been blind ; but if 
he composed the epics which bear his 
name he must have known moments 
of purer happiness than his most for- 
tunate contemporary ; Dante missed 
the lesser comforts of life, but there 
were hours of transcendent joy in his 
lonely career. For the highest joy 
of which men taste is the full, free, 
and noble putting forth of the power 
that is in them ; no moments in human 
experience are so thrilling as those in 
which a man's soul goes out from him 
into some adequate and beautiful form 
of expression. In the act of creation 
a man incorporates his own personality 
into the visible world about him, and 
no 



Personality. 

in a true and noble sense gives himself 
to his fellows. When an artist looks 
at his work he "sees himself; he has 
performed the highest task of which 
he is capable, and fulfilled the highest 
purpose for which he was planned by 
an artist greater than himself. 

The rapture of the creative mood 
and moment is the reward of the little 
group whose touch on any kind of 
material is imperishable. It comes 
when the spell of inspired work is on 
them, or in the moment which follows 
immediately on completion and before 
the reaction of depression — which is 
the heavy penalty of the artistic tem- 
perament — has set in. Balzac knew 
it in that frenzy of work which seized 
him for days together ; and Tnackeray 
knew it, as he confesses, when he had 
put the finishing touches on that 
striking scene in which Rawdon 
in 



Personality. 

Crawley thrashes Lord Steyne within 
an inch of his wicked life. The great 
novelist, who happened also to be a 
great writer, knew that the whole 
scene, in conception and execution, 
was a stroke of genius. But while 
this supreme rapture belongs to a 
chosen few, it may be shared by all 
those who are ready to open the ima- 
gination to its approach. It is one of 
the great rewards of the artist that 
while other kinds of joy are often 
pathetically short-lived, his joy, hav- 
ing brought forth enduring works, is, 
in a sense, imperishable* And it not 
only endures ; it renews itself in kin- 
dred moments and experiences which 
it bestows upon those who approach 
it sympathetically. There are lines 
in the " Divine Comedy " which thrill 
us to-day as they must have thrilled 
Dante; there are passages in the 

112 



Personality. 

Shakespearian plays and sonnets which 
make a riot in the blood to-day as they 
doubtless set the poet's pulses beating 
three centuries ago. The student of 
literature, therefore, finds in its noblest 
works not only the ultimate results of 
race experience and the characteristic 
quality of race genius, but the highest 
activity of the greatest minds in their 
happiest and most expansive moments. 
In this commingling of the best that 
is in the race and the best that is in 
the individual lies the mystery of that 
double revelation which makes every 
work of art a disclosure not only of 
the nature of the man behind it, but 
of all men behind him. In this com- 
mingling, too, is preserved the most 
precious deposit of what the race has 
been and done, and of what the man 
has seen, felt, and known. In the 
nature of things no educational mate- 
8 113 



Personality. 

rial can be richer; none so funda- 
mentally expansive and illuminative. 
This contact with the richest per- 
sonalities the world has produced is one 
of the deepest sources of culture ; for 
nothing is more truly educative than 
association with persons of the high- 
est intelligence and power. When a 
man recalls his educational experience, 
he finds that many of his richest op- 
portunities were not identified with 
subjects or systems or apparatus, but 
with teachers. There is fundamental 
truth in Emerson's declaration that 
it makes very little difference what 
you study, but that it is in the high- 
est degree important with whom you 
study. There flows from the living 
teacher a power which no text-book 
can compass or contain, — the power 
of liberating the imagination and setting 
the student free to become an origi- 
114 



Personality. 

nal investigator. Text-books supply- 
methods, information, and discipline ; 
teachers impart the breath of life by 
giving us inspiration and impulse. 
Now, the great books are different 
from all other books in their posses- 
sion of this mysterious vital force ; 
they are not only text-books by reason 
of the knowledge they contain, but 
they are also books of life by reason 
of the disclosure of personality which 
they make. The student of" Faust " 
receives from that drama not only 
the poet's interpretation of man's life 
in the world, but he is also brought 
under the spell of Goethe's personality, 
and, in a real sense, gets from his book 
that which his friends got from the 
man. This in not true of secondary 
books ; it is true only of first-hand 
books. Secondary books are often 
products of skill, pieces of well- 
"5 



Personality. 

wrought but entirely self-conscious 
craftsmanship ; first-hand books are 
always the expression of what is 
deepest, most original and distinctive 
in the nature which produces them. 
In such books, therefore, we get not 
only the skill, the art, the knowledge ; 
we get, above all, the man. There is 
added to what he has to give us of 
thought or form the inestimable boon 
of his companionship. 

The reality of this element of per- 
sonality and the force for culture which 
resides in it are clearly illustrated by 
a comparison of the works of Plato 
with those of Aristotle. Aristotle was 
for many centuries the first name 
in philosophy, and is still one of the 
greatest; but Aristotle, although a 
student of the principles of the art 
of literature and a critic of deep phil- 
osophical insight, was primarily a 
116 



Personality. 

thinker, not an artist. One goes to 
him for discipline, for thought, for 
training in a very high sense ; one 
does not go to him for form, beauty, 
or personality. It is a clear, distinct, 
logical order of ideas, a definite system 
which he gives us ; not a view of life, 
a disclosure of the nature of man, a 
synthesis of ideas touched with beauty, 
dramatically arranged and set in the 
atmosphere of Athenian life. For 
these things one goes to Plato, who 
is not only a thinker, but an artist of 
wonderful gifts, — one who so closely 
and beautifully relates Greek thought 
to Greek life that we seem not to be 
studying a system of philosophy, but 
mingling with the society of Athens 
in its most fascinating groups and at 
its most significant moments. To the 
student of Aristotle the personality 
of the writer counts for nothing ; to 
117 



Personality. 

the student of the " Dialogues/' on 
the other hand, the personality of 
Plato counts for everything. If we 
approach him as a thinker, it is true, 
we discard everything except his 
ideas ; but if we approach him as a 
great writer, ideas are but part of the 
rich and illuminating whole which he 
offers us. One can imagine a man 
fully acquainting himself with the 
work of Aristotle and yet remaining 
almost devoid of culture ; but one 
cannot imagine a man coming into 
intimate companionship with Plato 
and remaining untouched by his rich, 
representative personality. 

From such a companionship some- 
thing must flow besides an enlarge- 
ment of ideas or a development of 
the power of clear thinking ; there 
must flow also the stimulating and 
illuminating impulse of a fresh contact 
118 



Personality. 

with a great nature ; there must result 
a certain liberation of the imagination, 
a certain widening of experience, a 
certain ripening of the mind of the 
student. The beauty of form, the 
varied and vital aspects of religious, 
social, and individual character, the 
splendour and charm of a nobly or- 
dered art in temples, speech, manners, 
and dress, the constant suggestion of 
the deep humanism behind that art 
and of the freshness and reality of all 
its forms of expression, — these things 
are as much and as great a part of 
the " Dialogues " as the thought ; and 
they are full of that quality which 
enriches and ripens the mind that 
comes under their influence. In these 
qualities of his style, quite as much as 
in his ideas, is to be found the real 
Plato, the great artist, who refused to 
consider philosophy as an abstract 
119 



Personality. 

creation of the mind, existing, so far 
as man is concerned, apart from the 
mind which formulates it, but who 
saw life in its totality and made 
thought luminous and real by dis- 
closing it at all points against the 
background of the life, the nature, 
and the habits of the thinker. This 
is the method of culture as distin- 
guished from that of scholarship ; and 
this is also the disclosure of the per- 
sonality of Plato as distinguished from 
his philosophical genius. Whoever 
studies the " Dialogues " with his 
heart as well as with his mind comes 
into persona relations with the richest 
mind of antiquity. 



120 



Chapter X. 
Liberation through Ideas. 

TV/TATTHEW ARNOLD was in 

the habit of dwelling on the 
importance of a free movement of 
fresh ideas through society ; the men 
who are in touch with such move- 
ments are certain to be productive, 
while those whose minds are not fed 
by this stimulus are likely to remain 
unfruitful. One of the most suggest- 
ive and beautiful facts in the spiritual 
history of men is the exhilaration 
which a great new thought brings 
with it ; the thrilling moments in his- 
tory are the moments of contact be- 
tween such ideas and the minds which 

121 



Liberation through Ideas. 

are open to their approach. It is true 
that fresh ideas often gain acceptance 
slowly and against great odds in the 
way of organised error and of individ- 
ual inertness and dulness ; neverthe- 
less, it is also true that certain great 
ideas rapidly clarify themselves in the 
thought of almost every century. 
They are opposed and rejected by a 
multitude, but they are in the air, as 
we say ; they seem to diffuse them- 
selves through all fields of thought, 
and they are often worked out har- 
moniously in different departments 
by men who have no concert of action, 
but whose minds are open and sensi- 
tive to these invisible currents of light 
and power. 

The first and the most enduring re- 
sult of this movement of ideas is the 
enlargement of the thoughts of men 
about themselves and their world. 

122 



Liberation through Ideas 



D 



Every great new truth compels, 
sooner or later, a readjustment of the 
whole body of organised truth as men 
hold it. The fresh thought about the 
physical constitution of man bears its 
fruit ultimately in some fresh notion 
of his spiritual constitution ; the new 
fact in geology does not spend its 
force until it has wrought a modifica- 
tion of the view of the creative method 
and the age of man in the world ; the 
fresh conception of the method of 
evolution along material and physical 
lines slowly reconstructs the philos- 
ophy of mental and spiritual develop- 
ment. Every new thought relates 
itself finally to all thought, and is 
like the forward step which continu- 
ally changes the horizon about the 
traveller. 

The history of man is the story of 
the ideas he has entertained and ac- 
I2 3 



Liberation through Ideas. 

cepted, and of his struggle to incor- 
porate these ideas into laws, customs, 
institutions, and character. At the 
heart of every race one finds certain 
ideas, not always clearly seen nor often 
definitely formulated save by a few 
persons, but unconsciously held with 
deathless tenacity and illustrated by a 
vast range of action and achievement ; 
at the heart of every great civilisation 
one finds a few dominant and vital 
conceptions which give a certain co- 
herence and unity to a vast movement 
of life. Now, the books of life, as 
has already been said, hold their place 
in universal literature because they 
reveal and illustrate, in symbol and 
personality, these fundamental ideas 
with supreme power and felicity. 
The large body of literature in prose 
and verse which is put between the 
covers of the Old Testament not only 
124 



Liberation through Ideas. 

gives us an account of what the He- 
brew race did in the world, but of its 
ideas about that world, and of the 
character which it formed for itself 
largely as the fruit of those ideas. 
Those ideas, it need hardly be said, 
not only registered a great advance on 
the ideas which preceded them, but 
remain in many respects the most 
fundamental ideas which the race as a 
whole has accepted. They lifted the 
men to whom they were originally re- 
vealed, or who accepted them, to a 
great height of spiritual and moral 
vision, and a race character was or- 
ganised about them of the most power- 
ful and persistent type. The modern 
student of the Old Testament is born 
into a very different atmosphere from 
that in which these conceptions of 
man and the universe were originally 
formed ; but though they have largely 
125 



Liberation through Ideas. 

lost their novelty, they have not lost 
the power of enlargement and expan- 
sion which were in them at the be- 
ginning. 

In his own history every man 
repeats, within certain limits, the 
history of the race ; and the inex- 
haustible educational value of race 
experience lies in the fact that it so 
completely parallels the history of 
every member of the race. Child- 
hood has the fancies and faiths of the 
earliest ages ; youth has visions and 
dreams which form, generation after 
generation, a kind of contemporary 
mythology ; maturity aspires after 
and sometimes attains the repose, the 
clear intelligence, the catholic outlook 
of the best modern type of mind and 
character. In some form every mod- 
ern man travels the road over which 
his predecessors have passed, but he 
126 



Liberation through Ideas. 

no longer blazes his path ; a highway 
has been built for him. He is spared 
the immense toil of formulating the 
ideas by which he lives, and of pass- 
ing through the searching experience 
which is often the only approach to 
the greatest truths. If he has origi- 
native power, he forms ideas of his 
own, but they are based on a massive 
foundation of ideas which others have 
worked out for him ; he passes 
through his own individual experi- 
ence, but he inherits the results of a 
multitude of experiences of which 
nothing remains save certain final 
generalisations. Every intelligent man 
is born into possession of a world of 
knowledge and truth which has been 
explored, settled, and organised for 
him. To the discovery and regula- 
tion of this world every race has 
worked with more or less definiteness 
127 



Liberation through Ideas. 

of aim, and the total result of the in- 
calculable labours and sufferings of 
men is the somewhat intangible but 
very real thing we call civilisation. 

At the heart of civilisation, and de- 
termining its form and quality, is that 
group of vital ideas to which each 
race has contributed according to its 
intelligence and power, — the measure 
of the greatness of a race being deter- 
mined by the value of its contribution 
to this organised spiritual life of the 
world. This body of ideas is the 
highest product of the life of men 
under historic conditions ; it is the 
quintessence of whatever was best and 
enduring not only in their thought, 
but in their feeling, their instinct, 
their affections, their activities ; and 
the degree in which the man of to-day 
is able to appropriate this rich re- 
sult of the deepest life of the past is 
128 



Liberation through Ideas. 

the measure of his culture. One may 
be well-trained and carefully disci- 
plined, and yet have no share in this 
organised life of the race ; but no one 
can possess real culture who has not, 
according to his ability, entered into 
it by making it a part of himself. It 
is by contact with these great ideas 
that the individual mind puts itself in 
touch with the universal mind and in- 
definitely expands and enriches itself. 
Culture rests on ideas rather than 
on knowledge ; its distinctive use of 
knowledge is to gain material for ideas. 
For this reason the " Iliad " and 
" Odyssey " are of more importance 
than Thucydides and Curtius. For 
Homer was not only in a very im- 
portant sense the historian of his race ; 
he was, above all, the expositor of its 
ideas. There is involved in the very 
structure of the Greek epics the fun- 
9 129 



Liberation through Ideas. 

damental conception of life as the 
Greeks looked at it; their view of 
reverence, worship, law, obligation, 
subordination, personality. No one 
can be said to have read these poems 
in any real sense until he has made 
these ideas clear to himself; and these 
ideas carry with them a definite en- 
largement of thought. When a man 
has gotten a clear view of the ideas 
about life held by a great race, he has 
gone a long way towards self-educa- 
tion, — so rich and illuminative are 
these central conceptions around which 
the life of each race has been organ- 
ised. To multiply these ideas by 
broad contact with the books of life is 
to expand one's thought so as to com- 
pass the essential thought of the en- 
tire race. And this is precisely what 
the man of broad culture accom- 
plishes ; he emancipates himself from 
130 



Liberation through Ideas. 

whatever is local, provincial, and tem- 
poral, by gaining the power of taking 
the race point of view. He is liber- 
ated by ideas, not only from his own 
ignorance and the limitations of his 
own nature, but from the partial 
knowledge and the prejudices of his 
time ; and liberation by ideas, and 
expansion through ideas, constitute 
one of the great services of the books 
of life to those who read them with 
an open mind. 



131 



Chapter XL 

The Logic of Free Life. 

HP HE ideas which form the sub- 
stance or substratum of the 
greatest books are not primarily the 
products of pure thought ; they have 
a far deeper origin, and their immense 
power of enlightenment and enrich- 
ment lies in the depth of their rootage 
in the unconscious life of the race. If 
it be true that the fundamental pro- 
cess of the physical universe and of 
the life of man, so far as we can under- 
stand them, is not intellectual, but 
vital, then it is also true that the 
formative ideas by which we live, and 
in the clear comprehension of which 
the greatness of intellectual and spirit- 
132 



The Logic of Free Life. 

ual life for us lies, have been borne in 
upon the race by living rather than 
by thinking. They are felt and ex- 
perienced first, and formulated later. 
It is clear that a definite purpose is 
being wrought out through phys- 
ical processes in the world of matter ; 
it is equally clear to most men that 
moral and spiritual purposes are being 
worked out through the processes 
which constitute the conditions of 
our being and acting in this world. 
It has been the engrossing and fruit- 
ful study of science to discover the 
processes and comprehend the ends 
of the physical order ; it is the highest 
office of art to discover and illustrate, 
for the most part unconsciously, the 
processes and results of the spiritual 
order by setting forth in concrete 
form the underlying and formative 
ideas of races and periods. 
*33 



The Logic of Free Life. 

" The thought that makes the work 
of art," says Mr. John La Farge in a 
discussion of the art of painting of 
singular insight and intelligence, " the 
thought which in its highest expres- 
sion we call genius, is not reflection 
or reflective thought. The thought 
which analyses has the same defi- 
ciencies as our eyes. It can fix only 
one point at a time. It is necessary 
for it to examine each element of con- 
sideration, and unite it to others, to 
make a whole. But the logic of free 
life, which is the logic of art, is like 
that logic of one using the eye, in 
which we make most wonderful com- 
binations of momentary adaptation, by 
co-ordinating innumerable memories, 
by rejecting those that are useless or 
antagonistic ; and all without being 
aware of it, so that those especially 
who most use the eye, as, for instance., 
i34 



The Logic of Free Life. 

the painter or the hunter, are una- 
ware of more than one single, instan- 
taneous action." This is a very happy 
formulation of a fundamental principle 
in art ; indeed, it brings before us the 
essential quality of art, its illustra- 
tion of thought in the order not of 
a formal logic, but of the logic of free 
life. It is at this point that it is 
differentiated from philosophy ; it is 
from this point that its immense 
spiritual significance becomes clear. 
In the great books fundamental ideas 
are set forth not in a systematic way, 
nor as the results of methodical teach- 
ing, but as they rise over the vast 
territory of actual living, and are clari- 
fied by the long-continued and many- 
sided experience of the race. Every 
book of the first order in literature of 
the creative kind is a final generalisa- 
tion from a vast experience. It is, to 
*35 



The Logic of Free Life. 

use Mr. La Farge's phrase, the co- 
ordination of innumerable memories, 
— memories shared by an innumera- 
ble company of persons, and becoming, 
at length and after long clarification, a 
kind of race memory ; and this mem- 
ory is so inclusive and tenacious that 
it holds intact the long and varied 
play of soil, sky, scenery, climate, 
faith, myth, suffering, action, historic 
process, through which the race has 
passed and by which it has been 
largely formed. 

The ideas which underlie the great 
books bring with them, therefore, 
when we really receive them into our 
minds, the entire background of the 
life out of which they took their rise. 
We are not only permitted to refresh 
ourselves at the inexhaustible spring, 
but, as we drink, the entire sweep of 
landscape, to the remotest mountains 
136 



The Logic of Free Life. 

in whose heart its sources are hidden, 
encompasses us like a vast living 
world. It is, in other words, the 
totality of things which great art 
gives us, — not things in isolation 
and detachment. Mr. La Farge will 
pardon further quotation ; he admi- 
rably states this great truth when he 
says that " in a work of art, executed 
through the body, and appealing to 
the mind through the senses, the 
entire make-up of its creator addresses 
the entire constitution of the man for 
whom it is meant." One may go 
further, and say of the greatest books 
that the whole race speaks through 
them to the whole man who puts 
himself in a receptive mood towards 
them. This totality of influences, 
conditions, and history which goes to 
the making of books of this order re- 
ceives dramatic unity, artistic sequence, 
*37 



The Logic of Free Life. 

and integral order and coherence from 
the personality of the writer. He 
gathers into himself the spiritual re- 
sults of the experience of his people 
or his age, and through his genius 
for expression the vast general back- 
ground of his personal life, which, as 
in the case of Homer, for instance, 
has entirely faded from view, rises 
once more in clear vision before us. 
" In any museum," says Mr. La 
Farge, "we can see certain great 
differences in things; which are so 
evident, so much on the surface, as 
almost to be our first impressions. 
They are the marks of the places 
where the works of art were born. 
Climate ; intensity of heat and light ; 
the nature of the earth ; whether there 
was much or little water in proportion 
to land ; plants, animals, surrounding 
beings, have helped to make these 
138 



The Logic of Free Life. 

differences, as well as manners, laws, 
religions, and national ideals. If you 
recall the more general physical im- 
pression of a gallery of Flemish 
paintings and of a gallery of Italian 
masters, you will have carried off in 
yourself two distinct impressions re- 
ceived during their lives by the men 
of these two races. The fact that they 
used their eyes more or less is only a 
small factor in this enormous aggre- 
gation of influences received by them 
and transmitted to us." 

From this point of view the inex- 
haustible significance of a great work 
of art becomes clear, both as regards 
its definite revelation of racial and 
individual truth, and as regards its 
educational or culture quality and 
value. Ideas are presented not in 
isolation and detachment, but in their 
totality of origin and relationship; 
i39 



The Logic of Free Life. 

they are not abstractions, general 
propositions, philosophical generalisa- 
tions ; they are living truths — truths, 
that is, which have become clear by 
long experience, and to which men 
stand, or have stood, in personal rela- 
tions. They are ideas, in other words, 
which stand together, not in the order 
of formal logic, but of the " logic of 
free life." They are not torn out of 
their normal relations ; they bring all 
their relationships with them. We 
are offered a plant in the soil, not a 
flower cut from its stem. Every man 
is rooted to the soil, touches through 
his senses the physical, and through 
his mind and heart the spiritual, order 
of his time ; all these influences are 
focussed in him, and according to his 
capacity he gathers them into his 
experience, formulates and expresses 
them. The greater and more pro- 
140 



The Logic of Free Life. 

ductive the man, the wider his contact 
with and absorption of the life of his 
time. For the artist stands nearest, 
not farthest from his contemporaries. 
He is not, however, a mere medium 
in their hands, not a mere secretary 
or recorder of their ideas and feelings. 
He is separated from them in the 
clearness of his vision of the signifi- 
cance of their activities, the ends 
towards which they are moving, the 
ideas which they are working out ; 
but, in the exact degree of his great- 
ness, he is one with them in sympa- 
thy, experience, and comprehension. 
They live for him, and he lives with 
them ; they work out ideas in the 
logic of free life, and he clarifies, inter- 
prets, and illustrates those ideas. 
The world is not saved by the rem- 
nant, as Matthew Arnold held ; it is 
saved through the remnant. The 
141 



The Logic of Free Life. 

elect of the race, its prophets, teach- 
ers, artists, — and every great artist is 
also a prophet and teacher, — are its 
leaders, not its masters ; its interpre- 
ters, not its creators. The race is 
dumb without its artists ; but the 
artists would be impossible without 
the sustaining fellowship of the race. 
In the making of the "Iliad" and 
the " Odyssey " the Greek race was 
in full partnership with Homer. 
The ideas which form the summits of 
human achievement are sustained by 
immense masses of earth ; the higher 
they rise the vaster their bases. The 
richer and wider the race life, the 
freer and deeper the play of that vital 
logic which produces the formative 
ideas. 



142 



Chapter XII. 
The Imagination. 

HTHE Lady of Shalott, sitting in 
her tower, looked into her magic 
mirror and saw the whole world go by, 
— monk, maiden, priest, knight, lady, 
and king, In the mirror of the im- 
agination not only the world of 
to-day but the entire movement of 
human life moves before the eye as 
the throngs of living men move on 
the streets. For the imagination is 
the real magician, of whose marvels all 
simulated magic is but a clumsy and 
mechanical imitation. It is the real 
power, of which all material powers 
are very inadequate symbols. Rarely 
x 43 



The Imagination. 

taken into account by teachers, largely- 
ignored by educational systems and 
philosophies, it is the divinest of all 
the powers which men are able to 
put forth, because it is the creative 
power. It uses thought, but, in a 
way, it is greater than thought, be- 
cause it builds out of thought that 
which thought alone is powerless to 
construct. It is, indeed, the essential 
element in great constructive think- 
ing ; for while we may have thoughts 
untouched by the imagination, one 
cannot think along high constructive 
lines without its constant aid. Iso- 
lated thoughts come unattended by 
it, but the thinking which issues in 
organised systems, in comprehensive 
interpretations of things and events, 
in those noble generalisations which 
have the splendour of the discovery 
of new worlds in them, in those con- 
144 



The Imagination. 

crete embodiments of idea which we 
call works of art, is conditioned on 
the use of the imagination. Plato's 
Dialogues were fashioned by it as 
truly as Homer's poems ; Hegel's 
philosophy was created by it as defi- 
nitely as Shakespeare's plays, and 
Newton and Kepler used it as freely 
as Dante or Rembrandt. 

Upon the use of this supreme fac- 
ulty we depend not only for creative 
power, but for education in the high- 
est sense of the word ; for culture is 
the highest result of education, and 
the final test of education is its power 
to produce culture. Goethe was in 
the habit of saying that sympathy is 
essential to all true criticism ; for no 
man can discern the heart of a move- 
ment, of a work of art, or of a race 
who does not put himself into heart 

relations with that which he is trying 
io i 4S 



The Imagination. 

to understand. We never really pos- 
sess an idea, a bit of knowledge, or a 
fact of experience until, we get below 
the mind of it into the heart of it. 
Now, sympathy in this sense is the 
imagination touched with feeling ; it 
is the imagination bringing thought 
and emotion into vital relation. In 
the process of culture, therefore, the 
imagination plays a great part ; for 
culture, it cannot too often be said, is 
knowledge, observation, and experi- 
ence incorporate into personality and 
become part of the very nature of the 
individual. The man of culture is 
pre-eminently a man of imagination ; 
lacking this quality, he may become 
learned by force of industry, or a 
scholar by virtue of a trained intelli- 
gence, but the ripeness, the balance, 
the peculiar richness of fibre which 
characterise the man of culture will be 
146 



The Imagination. 

denied him. The man of culture, it 
is true, is not always a man of creative 
power ; but he is never devoid of that 
kind of creative quality which trans- 
forms everything he receives into 
something personal and individual. 
And the more deeply one studies the 
work of the great artists, the more 
distinctly does he see the immense 
place which culture in the vital, as 
contrasted with the academic, sense 
held in their lives, and the great part 
it played in their productive activity. 
Dante, Goethe, Tennyson, Browning, 
Lowell, were men possessed in rare 
degree of culture of both kinds ; but 
Shakespeare and Burns were equally 
men of culture. They shared in the 
possession of this faculty of making 
all they saw and knew a part of them- 
selves. Between culture of this qual- 
ity and the creative power there is 
i47 



The Imagination. 

something more than complete unity ; 
there is almost identity, for they seem 
to be two forms of activity of the 
same power rather than distinct facul- 
ties. Culture enables us to receive 
the world into ourselves, not in 
the reflection of a magic mirror, 
but in the depths of a living soul ; 
to receive that world in such a way 
that we possess it ; it ceases to be 
outside us and becomes part of our 
very nature. The creative power en- 
ables us to refashion that world and 
to put it forth again out of ourselves, 
as it was originally put forth out of 
the life of the divine artist. The 
creative process is, therefore, a double 
process, and culture and genius stand 
in indissoluble union. 

The development of the imagina- 
tion, upon the power of which both 
absorption of knowledge and creative 
148 



The Imagination. 

capacity depend, is, therefore, a mat- 
ter of supreme importance. To this 
necessity educators will some day open 
their eyes, and educational systems 
will some day conform ; meantime, it 
must be done mainly by individual 
work. Knowledge, discipline, and 
technical training of the best sort are 
accessible on every hand ; but the de- 
velopment of the faculty which unites 
all these in the highest form of activ- 
ity must be secured mainly by per- 
sonal effort. The richest and most 
accessible material for this highest 
education is furnished by art ; and the 
form of art within reach of every civ- 
ilised man, at all times, in all places, 
is the book. To these masterpieces, 
which have been called the books of 
life, all men may turn with the assur- 
ance that as the supreme achievements 
of the imagination they have the 
149 



The Imagination. 

power of awakening, stimulating, and 
enriching it in the highest degree. 
For the genuine reader, who sees in a 
book what the writer has put there, 
repeats in a way the process through 
which the maker of the book passed. 
The man who reads the " Iliad " and 
the cc Odyssey " with his heart as well 
as his intelligence must measurably 
enter into the life which these poems 
describe and interpret ; he must iden- 
tify himself for the time with the race 
whose soul and historic character are 
revealed in epic form as in a great 
mirror; he must see life from the 
Greek point of view, and feel life as 
the Greek felt it. He must, in a 
word, go through the process by 
which the poems were made, as well 
as feel, comprehend, and enjoy their 
final perfection. In like manner the 
open-hearted and open-minded reader 
i5° 



The Imagination. 

of the Book of Job cannot rest con- 
tent with that noble poem in the form 
which it now possesses ; the imagina- 
tive impulse which even the casual 
reading of the poem liberates in him 
sends him behind the finished product 
to the life of which it was the immor- 
tal fruit ; he enters into the groping 
thought of an age which has perished 
out of all other remembrance ; he 
deals with a problem which is as old 
as man from the standpoint of men 
who have left no other record of 
themselves. In proportion to the 
depth of his feeling and the vitality of 
his imagination he must saturate him- 
self with the rich life of thought, con- 
viction, and emotion, of struggle and 
aspiration, out of which the greatest 
of the poems of nature took its rise. 
He must, in a word, receive into him- 
self the living material upon which 



The Imagination. 

the unknown poet worked. In such 
a process the imagination is evoked 
in full and free play ; it insensibly re- 
constructs a life gone out of knowl- 
edge ; selects, harmonises, unifies, and 
in a measure creates. It illuminates 
and unifies knowledge, divines the 
wide relations of thought, and dis- 
cerns its place in organic connection 
with the world which gave it birth. 

The material upon which this great 
power is nourished is specifically fur- 
nished by the works which it has 
created. As the eye is trained to 
discover the line of beauty by com- 
panionship with the works in which 
it is revealed with the greatest clear- 
ness and power, so is the imagination 
developed by intimacy with the books 
which disclose its depth, its reality, 
and its method. The reader of 
Shakespeare cannot follow the lead- 
l 5 2 



The Imagination. 

ings of his masterly imagination with- 
out feeling a liberation of his own 
faculty of seeing things as parts of a 
vast order of life. He does not gain 
the poet's creative power, but he is 
enlarged and enriched to the point 
where his own imagination plays 
directly on the material about it; 
he receives it into himself, and in the 
exact measure in which he learns 
the secret of absorbing what he sees, 
feels, and knows, becomes master and 
interpreter of the world of his time, 
and restorer of the world of other 
times and men. For the imagina- 
tion, playing upon fact and experi- 
ence, divines their meaning and puts 
us in possession of the truth and life 
that are in them. To possess this 
magical power is to live the v/hole of 
life and to enter into the heritage of 
history. 

J 53 



Chapter XIII. 
Breadth of Life. 

/^\NE of the prime characteristics of 
the man of culture is freedom 
from provincialism, complete deliver- 
ance from rigidity of temper, narrow- 
ness of interest, uncertainty of taste, 
and general unripeness. The villager, 
or pagan in the old sense, is always a 
provincial ; his horizon is narrow, his 
outlook upon the world restricted, his 
knowledge of life limited. He may 
know a few things thoroughly ; he 
cannot know them in true relation to 
one another or to the larger order of 
which they are part. He may know 
a few persons intimately; he cannot 
i54 



Breadth of Life. 

know the representative persons of 
his time or of his race. The essence 
of provincialism is the substitution of 
a part for the whole ; the acceptance 
of the local experience, knowledge, 
and standards as possessing the au- 
thority of the universal experience, 
knowledge, and standards. The local 
experience is entirely true in its own 
sphere ; it becomes misleading when 
it is accepted as the experience of all 
time and all men. It is this mistake 
which breeds that narrowness and un- 
certainty of taste and opinion from 
which culture furnishes the only es- 
cape. A small community, isolated 
from other communities by the acci- 
dents of position, often comes to 
believe that its way of doing things 
is the w ay of the world ; a small body 
of religious people, devoutly attentive 
to their own observances, often reach 
*55 



Breadth of Life. 

the conclusion that these observances 
are the practice of that catholic church 
which includes the pious-minded of 
all creeds and rituals ; a group of radi- 
cal reformers, by passionate advocacy 
of a single reform, come to believe 
that there have been no reformers 
before them, and that none will be 
needed after them ; a band of fresh 
and audacious young practitioners of 
any of the arts, by dint of insistence 
upon a certain manner, rapidly gene- 
rate the conviction that art has no 
other manner. 

Society is full of provincialism in 
art, politics, religion, and economics ; 
and the essence of this provincialism is 
always the same, — the substitution of 
a part for the whole. Larger knowl- 
edge of the world and of history 
would make it perfectly clear that 
there has always been, not only a 
156 



Breadth of Life. 

wide latitude, but great variation, in 
ritual and worship ; that the political 
story of all the progressive nations 
has been one long agitation for re- 
forms, and that no reform can ever be 
final ; that reform must succeed re- 
form until the end of time, — reforms 
being in their nature neither more 
nor less than those readjustments to 
new conditions which are involved 
in all social development. A wider 
survey of experience would make it 
clear that art has many manners, 
and that no manner is supreme and 
none final, 

A long experience gives a man 
poise, balance, and steadiness ; he has 
seen many things come and go, and 
he is neither paralysed by depression 
when society goes wrong, nor irra- 
tionally elated when it goes right. 
He is perfectly aware that his party 
*57 



Breadth of Life. 

is only a means to an end, and not a 
piece of indestructible and infallible 
machinery ; that the creed he accepts 
has passed through many changes of 
interpretation, and will pass through 
more ; that the social order for which 
he contends, if secured, will be only 
another stage in the unbroken devel- 
opment of the organised life of men 
in the world. And culture is, at 
bottom, only an enlarged and clarified 
experience, — an experience so com- 
prehensive that it puts its possessor 
in touch with all times and men, and 
gives him the opportunity of com- 
paring his own knowledge of things, 
his faith and his practice, with the 
knowledge, faith, and practice of all 
the generations. This opportunity 
brings, to one who knows how to 
use it, deliverance from the igno- 
rance or half-knowledge of provincial- 
158 



Breadth of Life. 

ism, from the crudity of its half-trained 
tastes, and from the blind passion of 
its rash and groundless faith in its 
own infallibility. 

Provincialism is the soil in which 
philistinism grows most rapidly and 
widely. For as the essence of pro- 
vincialism is the substitution of a part 
for the whole, so the essence of phi- 
listinism is the conviction that what 
one possesses is the best of its kind, 
that the kind is the highest, and that 
one has all he needs of it. A true 
philistine is not only convinced that 
he holds the only true and consistent 
position, but he is also entirely satis- 
fied with himself. He is infallible 
and he is sufficient unto himself. In 
politics he is a blind partisan, in the- 
ology an arrogant dogmatist, in art an 
ignorant propagandist. What he ac- 
cepts, believes, or has, is not only the 
*59 



Breadth of Life. 

best of its kind, but nothing better 
can ever supersede it. 

To this spirit the spirit of culture 
is antipodal ; between the two there is 
inextinguishable antagonism. They 
can never compromise or agree upon 
a truce, any more than day and night 
can consent to dwell together. To 
destroy philistinism root and branch, 
to eradicate the ignorance which makes 
it possible for a man to believe that 
he possesses all things in their final 
forms, to empty a man of the stupid- 
ity and vulgarity of self-satisfaction, 
and to invigorate the immortal dis- 
satisfaction of the soul with its present 
attainments, are the ends which culture 
is always seeking to accomplish. The 
keen lance of Matthew Arnold, flash- 
ing now in one part of the field and 
now in another, pierced many of the 
fallacies of provincialism and philistin- 
160 



Breadth of Life. 

ism, and mortally wounded more than 
one Goliath of ignorance and conceit ; 
but the work must be done anew in 
every generation and in every individ- 
ual. All men are conceived in the 
sin of ignorance and born in the ini- 
quity of half-knowledge; and every 
man needs to be saved by wider 
knowledge and clearer vision. It is 
a matter of comparative indifference 
where one is born ; it is a matter of 
supreme importance how one educates 
one's self. There is as genuine a 
provincialism in Paris as in the re- 
motest frontier town ; it is better 
dressed and better mannered, but it 
is not less narrow and vulgar. There 
is as much vulgarity in the arrogance 
of a czar as in that of an African 
chief; as much absurdity in the self- 
satisfaction of the man who believes 
that the habit and speech of the boule- 
« 161 



Breadth of Life. 

vard are the ultimate habit and speech 
of the race, as in that of the man who 
accepts the manners of the mining 
camp as the finalities of human inter- 
course. Culture is not an accident 
of birth, although surroundings re- 
tard or advance it; it is always a 
matter of individual education. 

This education finds no richer ma- 
terial than that which is contained in 
literature ; for the characteristic of lit- 
erature, as of all the arts, is its uni- 
versality of interest, its elevation of 
taste, its disclosure of ideas, its con- 
stant appeal to the highest in the 
reader by its revelation of the highest 
in the writer. Many of the noblest 
works of literature are intensely local 
in colour, atmosphere, material, and 
allusion ; but in every case that which 
is of universal interest is touched, 
evoked, and expressed. The artist 
162 



Breadth of Life. 

makes the figure he paints stand out 
with the greatest distinctness by the 
accuracy of the details introduced 
and by the skill with which they are 
handled ; but the very definiteness of 
the figure gives force and clearness to 
the revelation of the universal trait or 
characteristic which is made through 
it. Pere Goriot has the ineffaceable 
stamp of Paris upon him, but he is for 
that very reason the more completely 
disclosed as a typical individuality. 
Literature abounds in illustrations of 
this true and artistic adjustment of 
the local to the universal, this dis- 
closure of the common humanity in 
which all men share through the 
highly elaborated individuality ; and 
this characteristic indicates one of 
the deepest sources of its educational 
power. So searching is this power 
that it is safe to say that no one can 
163 



Breadth of Life, 

know thoroughly the great books of 
the world and remain a provincial or 
a philistine ; the very air of these 
works is fatal to narrow views, to low 
standards, and to self-satisfaction. 



164 



Chapter XIV. 
Racial Experience. 

HP HE RE is a general agreement 
among men that experience is 
the most effective and successful of 
teachers ; that for many men no other 
form of education is possible ; and 
that those who enjoy the fullest edu- 
cational opportunities miss the deeper 
processes of training if they fail of 
that wide contact with the happenings 
of life which we call experience. To 
touch the world at many points ; to 
come into relations with many kinds 
of men ; to think, to feel, and to act 
on a generous scale, — these are prime 
opportunities for growth. For it is 
165 



Racial Experience. 

not only true, as Browning said so 
often and in so many kinds of speech, 
that a man's greatest good fortune is 
to have the opportunity of giving out 
freely and powerfully all the force that 
is in him, but it is also true that al- 
most equal good fortune attends the 
man who has the opportunity of re- 
ceiving truth and instruction through 
a wide and rich experience. 

But individual experience, however 
inclusive and deep, is necessarily lim- 
ited, and the life of the greatest man 
would be confined within narrow 
boundaries if he were shut within the 
circle of his own individual contact 
with things and persons. If Shake- 
speare had written of those things only 
of which he had personal knowledge, 
of those experiences in which he had 
personally shared, his contribution to 
literature would be deeply interesting, 
166 



Racial Experience. 

but it would not possess that quality 
of universality which makes it the 
property of the race. In Shakespeare 
there was not only knowledge of man, 
but knowledge of men as well. His 
greatness rests not only on his own 
commanding personality, but on his 
magical power of laying other person- 
alities under tribute for the enlarge- 
ment of his view of things and the 
enrichment of his portraiture of hu- 
manity. A man learns much from 
his own contacts with his time and his 
race, but one of the most important 
gains he makes is the development of 
the faculty of appropriating the re- 
sults of the contacts of other men with 
other times and races ; and one of the 
finer qualities of rich experience is 
the quickening of the imagination to 
divine that which is hidden in the 
experience of other races and ages. 
167 



Racial Experience. 

The man of culture must not only 
live deeply and intelligently in his 
own experience, rationalising and uti- 
lising it as he passes through it; he 
must also break away from its lim- 
itations and escape its tendency to 
substitute a part of life, distinctly 
seen, for the whole of life, vaguely 
discerned. The great writer, for in- 
stance, must first make his own nature 
rich in its development and powerful 
in harmony of aim and force, and he 
must also make this nature sensitive, 
sympathetic, and clairvoyant in its re- 
lations with the natures of other men. 
To become self-centred, and yet to 
be able to pass entirely out of one's 
self into the thoughts, emotions, im- 
pulses, and sufferings of others, in- 
volves a harmonising of opposing 
tendencies which is difficult of attain- 
ment. 

168 



Racial Experience. 

It is precisely this poise which men 
of the highest productive power se- 
cure ; for it is this nice adjustment of 
the individual discovery of truth to 
the general discovery of truth which 
gives a man of imaginative faculty 
range, power, and sanity of view. 
To see, feel, think, and act strongly 
and intelligently in our own individ- 
ual world gives us first-hand relations 
to that world, and first-hand knowl- 
edge of it ; to pass beyond the limits 
of this small sphere, which we touch 
with our own hands, into the larger 
spheres which other men touch, not 
only widens our knowledge but vastly 
increases our power. It is like ex- 
changing the power of a small stream 
for the general power which plays 
through Nature. One of the meas- 
ures of greatness is furnished by this 
ability to pass through individual into 
169 



Racial Experience. 

national or racial experience ; for a 
man's spiritual dimensions, as revealed 
through any form of art, are deter- 
mined by his power of discerning 
essential qualities and experiences in 
the greatest number of people. The 
four writers who hold the highest 
places in literature justify their claims 
by their universality ; that is to say, 
by the range of their knowledge of 
life as that knowledge lies revealed in 
the experience of the race. 

It is the fortune of a very small 
group of men in any age to possess 
the power of divining, by the gift of 
genius, the world which lies, nebulous 
and shadowy, in the lives of men 
about them, or in the lives of men 
of other times ; in the nature of 
things, the clairvoyant vision of poets 
like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, 
of novelists like Thackeray, Balzac, 
170 



Racial Experience. 

and Tolstoi, is not at the command 
of all men ; and yet all men may 
share in it and be enlarged by it. 
This is one of the most important 
services which literature renders to its 
lover : it makes him a companion of 
the most interesting personalities in 
their most significant moments ; it 
enables him to break the bars of in- 
dividual experience and escape into 
the wider and richer life of the race. 
Within the compass of a very small 
room, on a very few shelves, the real 
story of man in this world may be 
collected in the books of life in which 
it is written ; and the solitary reader, 
whose personal contacts with men and 
events are few and lacking in distinc- 
tion and interest, may enter, through 
his books, into the most thrilling life 
of the race in some of its most signifi- 
cant moments. 

171 



Racial Experience. 

No man can read " In Memoriam " 
or " The Ring and the Book " with- 
out passing beyond the boundaries of 
his individual experience into experi- 
ences which broaden and quicken his 
own spirit; and no one can become 
familiar with the novels of Tourgu6- 
neff or Tolstoi without touching life 
at new points and passing through 
emotions which would never have 
been stirred in him by the happen- 
ings of his own life. Such a story as 
"Anna Karenina" leaves no reader 
of imagination or heart entirely un- 
changed; its elemental moral and 
artistic force strikes into every recep- 
tive mind and leaves there a knowl- 
edge of life not possessed before. The 
work of the Russian novelists has 
been, indeed, a new reading in the 
book of experience ; it has made a 
notable addition to the sum total of 
172 



Racial Experience. 

humanity's knowledge of itself. In 
the pages of Gogol, Dostoievsky 
TourguenefF, and Tolstoi, the major- 
ity of readers have found a world ab- 
solutely new to them ; and in reading 
those pages, so penetrated with the 
dramatic spirit, they have come into 
the possession of a knowledge of life 
not formal and didactic, but deep, 
vital, and racial in its range and sig- 
nificance. To possess the knowledge 
of an experience at once so remote 
and so rich in disclosure of character, 
so charged with tragic interest, is to 
push back the horizons of our own 
experience, to secure a real contri- 
bution to our own enrichment and 
development. Whoever carries that 
process far enough brings into his in- 
dividual experience much of the rich- 
ness and splendour of the experience 
of the race. 

i73 



Chapter XV. 
Freshness of Feeling. 

*T*HE primary charm of art resides 
in the freshness of feeling which 
it reveals and conveys. An art which 
discloses fatigue, weariness, exhaustion 
of emotion, deadening of interest, has 
parted with its magical spell ; for vital- 
ity, emotion, passionate interest in the 
experiences of life, devout acceptance 
of the facts of life, are the prime char- 
acteristics of art in those moments 
when its veracity and power are at the 
highest point. A great work of art 
may be tragic in the view of life which 
it presents, but it must show no sign 
of the succumbing of the spirit to the 
i74 



Freshness of Feeling. 

appalling facts with which it deals ; 
even in those cases in which, as in 
the tragedy of " King Lear," blind 
fate seems relentlessly sovereign over 
human affairs, the artist must disclose 
in his attitude and method a sustained 
energy of spirit. Nothing shows so 
clearly a decline in creative force as 
a loss of interest on the part of the 
artist in the subject or material with 
which he deals. 

That fresh bloom which lies on the 
very face of poetry, and in which not 
only its obvious but its enduring charm 
resides, is the expression of a feeling 
for nature, for life, and for the happen- 
ings which make up the common lot, 
which keeps its earliest receptivity and 
responsiveness. When a man ceases 
to care deeply for things, he ceases to 
represent or interpret them with in- 
sight and power. The preservation 
J 75 



Freshness of Feeling. 

of feeling is, therefore, essential in all 
artistic work ; and when it is lost, the 
artist becomes an echo or an imitation 
of his nobler self and work. It is 
the beautiful quality of the true art 
instinct that it constantly sees and 
feels the familiar world with a kind of 
childlike directness and delight. That 
which has become commonplace to 
most men is as full of charm and 
novelty to the artist as if it had just 
been created. He sees it with fresh 
eyes and feels it with a fresh heart. 
To such a spirit nothing becomes 
stale and hackneyed ; everything re- 
mains new, fresh, and significant. It 
has often been said that if it were not 
for the children the world would lose 
the faith, the enthusiasm, the delight 
which constantly renew its spirit and 
reinforce its courage. A world grown 
old in feeling would be an exhausted 
176 



Freshness of Feeling. 

world, incapable of production along 
spiritual or artistic lines. Now, the 
artist is always a child in the eager- 
ness of his spirit and the freshness of 
his feeling ; he retains the magical 
power of seeing things habitually, and 
still seeing them freshly. Mr. Lowell 
was walking with a friend along a 
country road when they came upon a 
large building which bore^the inscrip- 
tion, " Home for Incurable Children." 
" They '11 take me there some day," 
was the half-humorous comment of a 
sensitive man, to whom life brought 
great sorrows, but who retained to the 
very end a youthful buoyancy, cour- 
age, and faculty of finding delight in 
common things. 

It is a significant fact that the great- 
est men and women never lose the 
qualities which are commonly associ- 
ated with youth, — freshness of feeling, 

12 I?7 



Freshness of Feeling. 

zest for work, joy in life. Goethe at 
eighty-four studied the problems of 
life with the same deep interest which 
he had felt in them at thirty or forty ; 
Tennyson's imagination showed some 
signs of waning power in extreme old 
age, but the magic of feeling was still 
fresh in his heart ; Dr. Holmes car- 
ried his blithe spirit, his gayety and 
spontaneity of wit, to the last year of 
his life ; and Mr. Gladstone at eighty- 
six is one of the most eager and 
aspiring men of his time. Genius 
seems to be allied to immortal youth ; 
and in this alliance resides a large part 
of its power. For the man of genius 
does not demonstrate his possession 
of that rare and elusive gift by seeing 
things which have never been seen 
before, but by seeing with fresh inter- 
est what men have seen so often that 
they have ceased to regard it. Nov- 
178 



Freshness of Feeling. 

elty is rarely characteristic of great 
works of art ; on the contrary, the 
facts of life which they set before us 
are familiar, and the thoughts they 
convey by direct statement or by dra- 
matic illustration have always been 
haunting our minds. The secret of 
the artist resides in the unwearied vi- 
tality which brings him to such close 
quarters with life, and endows him 
with directness of sight and freshness 
of feeling. Daisies have starred fields 
in Scotland since men began to plough 
and reap, but Burns saw them as if 
they had sprung from the ground for 
the first time ; forgotten generations 
have seen the lark rise and heard the 
cuckoo call in England, but to Words- 
worth the song from the upper sky 
and the notes from the thicket on the 
hill were full of the music of the first 
morning. Shakespeare dealt with old 
179 



Freshness of Feeling. 

stories and constantly touched upon 
the most familiar things ; but with 
what new interest he invests both 
theme and illustration ! One may- 
spend a lifetime in a country village, 
surrounded by people who are appar- 
ently entirely uninteresting ; but if 
one has the eye of a novelist for the 
facts of life, the power to divine char- 
acter, the gift to catch the turn of 
speech, the trick of voice, the pecu- 
liarity of manner, what resources, dis- 
coveries, and diversion are at hand ! 
The artist never has to search for 
material ; it is always at hand. That 
it is old, trite, stale to others, is of no 
consequence ; it is always fresh and 
significant to him. 

This freshness of feeling is not in 

any way dependent on the character 

of the materials upon which it plays ; 

it is not an irresponsible tempera- 

180 



Freshness of Feeling. 

mental quality which seeks the joyful 
or comic facts of life and ignores its 
sad and tragic aspects. The zest of 
spirit which one finds in Shakespeare, 
for instance, is not a blind optimism 
thoughtlessly escaping from the shad- 
ows into the sunshine. On the con- 
trary, it is drawn by a deep instinct to 
study the most perplexing problems 
of character, and to drop its plummets 
into the blackest abysses of experi- 
ence. Literature deals habitually with 
the most sombre side of the human 
lot, and finds its richest material in 
those awful happenings which invest 
the history of every race with such 
pathetic interest; and yet literature, 
in its great moments, overflows with 
vitality, zest of spirit, freshness of 
spirit ! There is no contradiction in 
all this ; for the vitality which per- 
vades great art is not dependent upon 
181 



Freshness of Feeling. 

external conditions ; it has its source 
in the soul of the artist. It is the 
immortal quality in the human spirit 
playing like sunshine on the hardest 
and most tragic facts of experience. 
It often suggests no explanation of 
these facts ; it is content to present 
them with relentless veracity ; but 
even when it offers no solution of the 
tragic problem, the tireless interest 
which it feels, the force with which it 
illustrates and describes, the power of 
moral organisation and interpretation 
which it reveals, carry with them the 
conviction that the spirit of man, how- 
ever baffled and beaten, is superior to 
all the accidents of fortune, and inde- 
structible even within the circle of the 
blackest fate. As CEdipus, old, blind, 
and smitten, vanishes from our sight, 
we think of him no longer as a great 
figure blasted by adverse fate, but as a 
182 



Freshness of Feeling. 

great soul smitten and scourged, and 
yet still invested with the dignity of 
immortality. The dramatist, even 
when he throws no light on the ulti- 
mate solution of the problem with 
which he is dealing, feels so deeply 
and freshly, and discloses such sus- 
tained strength, that the vitality with 
which the facts are exhibited and the 
question stated affirms its superiority 
over all the adversities and catas- 
trophes of fortune. 

This freshness of feeling, which is 
the gift of men and women of genius, 
must be possessed in some measure 
by all who long to get the most out 
of life and to develop their own inner 
resources. To retain zest in work 
and delight in life we must keep fresh- 
ness of feeling. Its presence lends 
unfailing charm to its possessor ; its 
loss involves loss of the deepest per- 
183 



Freshness of Feeling. 

sonal charm. It is essential in all 
genuine culture, because it sustains 
that interest in events, experience, 
and opportunity upon which growth 
is largely conditioned; and there is 
no more effective means of preserving 
and developing it than intimacy with 
those who have invested all life with 
its charm. The great books are res- 
ervoirs of this vitality. When our 
own interest begins to die and the 
world turns gray and old in our sight, 
we have only to open Homer, Shake- 
speare, Browning, and the flowers 
bloom again and the skies are blue ; 
and the experiences of life, however 
tragic, are matched by a vitality which 
is sovereign over them all. 



184 



Chapter XVI. 
Liberation from One's Time. 

HP HE law of opposites under which 
men live is very strikingly 
brought out in the endeavour to se- 
cure a sound and intelligent adjust- 
ment to one's time, — a relation 
intimate and vital, and at the same 
time deliberately and judicially as- 
sumed. To be detached in thought, 
feeling, or action, from the age in 
which one lives, is to cut the ties that 
bind the individual to society, and 
through which he is very largely 
nourished and educated. To live 
deeply and really through every 
form of expression and in every 
185 



Liberation from One's Time. 

relationship is so essential to the 
complete unfolding of the person- 
ality that he who falls below the full 
measure of his capacity for experi- 
ence and for expression falls below 
the full measure of his possible 
growth. Life is not, as some men 
of detached moods or purely critical 
temper have assumed, a spectacle 
of which the secret can be mastered 
without sharing in the movement; 
it is rather a drama, the splendour 
of whose expression and the depth 
of whose meaning are revealed to 
those alone who share in the action. 
To stand aside from the vital move- 
ment and study life in a purely 
critical spirit is to miss the deeper 
education which is involved in the 
vital process, and to lose the funda- 
mental revelation which is slowly 
and painfully disclosed to those 
1 86 



Liberation from One's Time. 

whose minds and hearts are open 
to receive it. No one can under- 
stand love who has not loved and 
been loved ; no one can compre- 
hend sorrow who has not had the 
companionship of sorrow. The ex- 
periment has been made in many 
forms, but no one has yet been 
nourished by the fruit of the tree 
of knowledge who has eaten of that 
fruit alone. In the art of living, 
as in all the arts which illustrate 
and enrich living, the amateur and 
the dilettante have no real position ; 
they never attain to that mastery 
of knowledge or of execution which 
alone give reality to a man's life or 
work. Mastery in any art comes 
to those only who give themselves 
without reservation or stint to their 
task ; mastery in the supreme art of 
living is within reach of those only 
187 



Liberation from One's Time. 

who live completely in every faculty 
and relation. 

To stand in the closest and most 
vital relation to one's time is, there- 
fore, the first condition of compre- 
hending one's age and getting from it 
what it has to give. But while a man 
must be in and with his time in the 
most vital sense, he must not be 
wholly of it. To get the vital en- 
richment which flows from identifica- 
tion with one's age, and at the same 
time to get the detachment which en- 
ables one to see his time in true rela- 
tion to all time, is one of the problems 
which requires the highest wisdom 
for its solution. It is easy to become 
entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is 
easy to detach one's self from it, and 
study it in a cold and critical temper ; 
but to get its warmth and vitality and 
escape its narrowing and limiting in- 
188 



Liberation from One's Time. 

fluence is so difficult that compara- 
tively few men succeed in striking the 
balance between two divergent tend- 
encies. 

A man gets power and knowledge 
from his time in the degree in which 
he suffers it to enlarge and vitalise 
him ; he loses power and knowledge 
in the degree in which he suffers it to 
limit his vision and confine his inter- 
ests. The Time Spirit is the greatest 
of our teachers so long as it is the in- 
terpreter of the Eternal Spirit ; it is 
the most fallible and misleading of 
teachers when it attempts to speak 
for itself. The visible and material 
things by which we are surrounded 
are of immense helpfulness so long as 
they symbolise invisible and spiritual 
things ; they become stones of stum- 
bling and rocks of offence when they 
are detached from the spiritual order 
189 



Liberation from One's Time. 

and set apart in an order of their own. 
The age in which we live affords a 
concrete illustration of the vital pro- 
cesses in society and means of contact 
with that society, but it is comprehen- 
sible and educative in the exact degree 
in which we understand its relation to 
other times. The impression which 
the day makes upon us needs to be 
tested by the impression which we re- 
ceive from the year ; the judgment of 
a decade must be corrected by the 
judgment of the century. The pres- 
ent hour is subtly illusive ; it fills the 
whole stage, to the exclusion of the 
past and the present; it appears to 
stand alone, detached from all that 
went before or is to follow ; it seems 
to be the historic moment, the one 
reality amid fleeting shadows. As a 
matter of fact, it is a logical product 
of the past, bound to it by ties so elu- 
190 



Liberation from One's Time. 

sive that we cannot trace them, and 
so numerous and tenacious that we 
cannot sever them ; it is but a frag- 
ment of a whole immeasurably greater 
than itself; its character is so com- 
pletely determined by the past that 
the most radical changes we can make 
in it are essentially superficial ; for it 
is the future, not the present, which 
is in our hands. To get even a 
glimpse of the character and meaning 
of our own time, we must, therefore, 
see it in relation to all time ; to mas- 
ter it in any sense we must set it in its 
true historical relations. That which 
to the uneducated mind seems porten- 
tous is lightly regarded by the mind 
which sees the apparently isolated 
event in a true historic perspective ; 
while the occurrence or condition 
which is barely noticed by the un- 
trained, seen in the same perspective, 
191 



Liberation from One's Time. 

becomes tragic in its prophecy of 
change and suffering. History is full 
of corrections of the mistaken judg- 
ments of the hour ; and from the hate 
or adoration of contemporaries, the 
wise man turns to the clear-sighted 
and inexorable judgment of posterity. 
In the far-seeing vision of a trained 
intelligence the hour is never detached 
from the day, nor the day from the 
year ; and the year is always held in 
its place in the century. 

Now, the man of culture has pre- 
eminently the gift of living deeply in 
his own age, and at the same time of 
seeing it in relation to all ages. It 
has no illusion for him ; it cannot de- 
ceive him with its passionate accept- 
ance or its equally passionate rejection. 
He sees the crown shining above the 
cross ; he hears the long thunders of 
applause breaking in upon execrations 
192 



Liberation from One's Time. 

which they will finally silence ; he 
foresees the harvest in the seed that 
lies barely covered on the surface ; 
and, afar off, his ear notes the final 
crash of that which at the moment 
seems to carry with it the assurance of 
eternal duration. Such a man secures 
the vitality of his time, but he escapes 
its limitation of vision by seeing it 
clearly and seeing it whole ; he cor- 
rects the teaching of the time spirit 
by constant reference to the teaching 
of the Eternal Spirit imparted in the 
long training and the wide revelation 
of history. The day is beautiful and 
significant, or ominous and tragic, to 
him as it discloses its relation to the 
good or the evil of the years that are 
gone. And these vital associations, 
these deep historic connections, are 
brought to light with peculiar clear- 
ness in literature. Beyond all other 
13 193 



Liberation from One's Time. 

means of enfranchisement, the book 
liberates a man from imprisonment 
within the narrow limits of his own 
time ; it makes him free of all times. 
He lives in all periods, under all 
forms of government, in all social 
conditions ; the mind of antiquity, of 
medievalism, of the Renaissance, is 
as open to him as the mind of his own 
day, and so he is able to look upon 
human life in its entirety. 



194 



Chapter XVII. 

Liberation from One's Place. 

' I ^HE instinct which drives men to 
travel is at bottom identical with 
that which fills men with passionate 
desire to know what is in life. Time 
and strength are often wasted in 
restless change from place to place ; 
but real wandering, however aimless 
in mood, is always education. To 
know one's neighbours and to be on 
good terms with the community in 
which one lives are the beginning of 
sound relations to the world at large ; 
but one never knows his village in 
any real sense until he knows the 
world. The distant hills which seem 
J 9S 



Liberation from One's Place. 

to be always calling the imaginative 
boy away from the familiar fields and 
hearth do not conspire against his 
peace, however much they may con- 
spire against his comfort ; they help 
him to the fulfilment of his destiny 
by suggesting to his imagination the 
deeper experience, the richer growth, 
the higher tasks which await him in 
the world beyond the horizon. Man 
is a wanderer by the law of his life ; 
and if he never leaves his home in 
which he is born, he never builds a 
home of his own. 

It is the law of life that a child 
should leave his father and separate 
himself from his inherited surround- 
ings, in order that by self-unfolding 
and self-realisation he may substi- 
tute a conscious for an unconscious, a 
moral for an instinctive relation. The 
instinct of the myth-makers was 
196 



Liberation from One's Place. 

sound when it led them to attach 
such importance to the wandering 
and the return ; the separation ef- 
fected in order that individuality and 
character might be realised through 
isolation and experience, the return 
voluntarily made through clear recog- 
nition of the soundness of the primi- 
tive relations, the beauty of the ser- 
vice of the older and wiser to the 
younger and the more ignorant. We 
are born into relations which we ac- 
cept as normal and inevitable ; we 
break away from them in order that 
by detachment we may see them ob- 
jectively and from a distance, and that 
we may come to self-consciousness ; 
we resume these relations of delib- 
erate purpose and with clear percep- 
tion of their moral significance. So 
the boy, grown to manhood, returns 
to his home from the world in which 
197 



Liberation from One's Place. 

he has tested himself and seen for the 
first time, with clear eyes, the depth 
and beauty of its service in the spirit- 
ual order; so the man who has re- 
volted from the barren and shal- 
low dogmatic statement of a spiritual 
truth returns, in riper years and with 
a deeper insight, to the truth which 
is no longer matter of inherited be- 
lief but of vital need and perception. 

The ripe, mature, full mind not 
only escapes the limitation of the time 
in which it finds itself; it also escapes 
from the limitations of the place in 
which it happens to be. A man of 
deep culture cannot be a provincial ; 
he must be a citizen of the world. 
The man of provincial tastes and 
ideas owns the acres ; the man of cul- 
ture commands the landscape. He 
knows the world beyond the hills ; 
he sees the great movement of life 
198 



Liberation from One's Place, 

from which the village seems almost 
shut out ; he shares those inclusive 
experiences which come to each age 
and give each age a character of its 
own. He is in fellowship and sym- 
pathy with the smaller community at 
his doors, but he belongs also to that 
greater community which is coter- 
minous with humanity itself. He is 
not disloyal to his immediate sur- 
roundings when he leaves them for 
exploration, travel, and discovery ; he 
is fulfilling that law of life which con- 
ditions true valuation of that into 
which one is born upon clear percep- 
tion of that which one must acquire 
for himself. 

The wanderings of individuals and 
races, which form so large a part of 
the substance of history, are witnesses 
of that craving for deeper experience 
and wider knowledge which is one of 
199 



Liberation from One's Place. 

the springs of human progress. The 
American cares for Europe not for its 
more skilful and elaborate ministra- 
tion to his comfort ; he is drawn to- 
wards it through the appeal of its rich 
historic life to his imagination and 
through the diversity and variety of 
its social and racial phenomena. And 
in like manner the European seeks the 
East, not simply as a matter of idle 
curiosity, but because he finds in the 
East conditions which are set in such 
sharp contrast with those with which 
he is familiar. The instinct for ex- 
pansion which gives human history 
its meaning and interest is constantly 
urging the man of sensitive mind to 
secure by observation that which he 
cannot get by experience. 

To secure the most complete de- 
velopment one must live in one's 
time and yet live above it, and one 

200 



Liberation from One's Place. 

must also live in one's home and yet 
live, at the same time, in the world. 
The life which is bounded in knowl- 
edge, interest, and activity by the in- 
visible but real and limiting walls of a 
small community is often definite in 
aim, effective in action, and upright 
in intention ; but it cannot be rich, 
varied, generous, and stimulating. 
The life, on the other hand, which is 
entirely detached from local associa- 
tions and tasks is often interesting, 
liberalising, and catholic in spirit ; but 
it cannot be original or productive. 
A sound life — balanced, poised, and 
intelligently directed — must stand 
strongly in both local and universal 
relations ; it must have the vitality and 
warmth of the first, and the breadth 
and range of the second. 

This liberation from provincial- 
ism is not only one of the signs of 
201 



Liberation from One's Place. 

culture, but it is also one of its finest 
results ; it registers a high degree of 
advancement. For the man who has 
passed beyond the prejudices, mis- 
conceptions, and narrowness of pro- 
vincialism has gone far on the road 
to self-education. He has made as 
marked an advance on the position of 
the great mass of his contemporaries 
as that position is an advance on the 
earlier stages of barbarism. The bar- 
barian lives only in his tribe ; the 
civilised man, in the exact degree in 
which he is civilised, lives with hu- 
manity. Books are among the rich- 
est resources against narrowing local 
influences ; they are the ripest exposi- 
tions of the world-spirit. To know 
the typical books of the race is to be in 
touch with those elements of thought 
and experience which are shared by 
men of all countries. Without a 
202 



Liberation from One's Place. 

knowledge of these books a man 
never really gets at the life of locali- 
ties which are foreign to him ; never 
really sees those historic places about 
which the traditions of civilisation 
have gathered. Travel is robbed of 
half its educational value unless one 
carries with him a knowledge of that 
which he looks at for the first time 
with his own eyes. No American 
sees England unless he carries Eng- 
land in his memory and imagination. 
Westminster Abbey is devoid of spir- 
itual significance to the man who is 
ignorant of the life out of which it 
grew, and of the history which is 
written in its architecture and its me- 
morials. The emancipation from the 
limitations of locality is greatly aided 
by travel, but it is accomplished only 
by intimate knowledge of the greater 
books. 

203 



Chapter XVIII. 

The Unconscious Element. 

V\^HILE it is true that the greatest 
books betray the most intimate 
acquaintance with the time in which 
they are written, and disclose the im- 
press of that time in thought, struc- 
ture, and style, it is also true that such 
books are so essentially independent 
of contemporary forms and moods 
that they largely escape the vicissi- 
tudes which attend those forms and 
moods. The element of enduring 
interest in them outweighs the acci- 
dents of local speech or provincial 
knowledge, as the force and genius 
of Caesar survive the armor he wore 
and the language he spoke. A great 
204 



The Unconscious Element. 

book is a possession for all time, be- 
cause a writer of the first rank is the 
contemporary of every generation ; 
he is never outgrown, exhausted, or 
even old-fashioned, although the gar- 
ments he wore may have been laid 
aside long ago. 

In this permanent quality, un- 
changed by changes of taste and form, 
resides the secret of that charm which 
draws about the great poets men and 
women of each succeeding period, 
eager to listen to words which thrilled 
the world when it was young, and 
which have a new meaning for every 
new age. It is safe to say that 
Homer will speak to men as long as 
language survives, and that transla- 
tion will follow translation to the end 
of time. What Robinson said of the 
Bible in one of the great moments of 
modern history may be said of the 
205 



The Unconscious Element. 

greater works of literature : more 
light will always stream from them. 
Indeed, many of them will not be 
understood until they are read in the 
light of long periods of history ; for 
as the great books are interpretations 
of life, so life in its historic revelation 
is one continuous commentary on the 
greater books. 

This preponderance of the perma- 
nent over the accidental or tempo- 
rary in books of this class is largely 
due to the unconscious element which 
plays so great a part in them : the 
element of universal experience, in 
which every man shares in the exact 
degree in which, in mind and heart, 
he approaches greatness. It is idle 
to attempt to separate arbitrarily in 
Shakespeare, for instance, those ele- 
ments in the poet's work which were 
deliberately introduced from those 
206 



The Unconscious Element. 

which went into it by the unconscious 
action of his whole nature ; but no 
one can study the plays intelligently 
without becoming more and more 
clearly aware of those depths of life 
which moved in the poet before they 
moved in his work ; which enlarged, 
enriched, and silently reorganised his 
view of life and his power of trans- 
lating life out of individual into uni- 
versal terms. It would be impossible, 
for instance, to write such a play as 
" The Tempest " by sheer force of 
intellect; in the creation of such a 
work there is involved, beyond liter- 
ary skill, calculation, and deep study 
of the relation of thought to form, a 
ripeness of spirit, a clearness of in- 
sight, a richness of imagination, which 
are so much part of the very soul of 
the poet that he does not separate 
them in thought, and cannot con- 
207 



The Unconscious Element. 

sciously balance, adjust, and employ 
them. They are quite beyond his 
immediate control, as they are beyond 
all attempts to imitate them. 

Cleverness may learn all the forms 
and methods, but it is powerless to 
imitate greatness ; it can simulate the 
conscious, dexterous side of greatness, 
but it cannot simulate the unconscious, 
vital side. The moment a man like 
Voltaire attempts to deal with such a 
character as Joan of Arc, his spiritual 
and artistic limitations become pain- 
fully apparent ; of cleverness there is 
no lack, but of reverence, insight, 
depth of feeling, the affinity of the 
great imagination for the great nature 
or deed, there is no sign. The man 
is entirely and hopelessly incapacitated 
for the work by virtue of certain limi- 
tations in his own nature of which 
he is obviously in entire ignorance. 
208 



The Unconscious Element. 

The conscious skill of Voltaire was 
delicate, subtle, full of vitality ; but the 
unconscious side of his nature was 
essentially shallow, thin, largely un- 
developed ; and it is the preponder- 
ance of the unconscious over the 
conscious in a man's life which makes 
him great in himself and equips him 
for work of the highest quality. No 
man can put his skill to the highest use 
and give his knowledge the final touch 
of individuality until both are so en- 
tirely incorporated in his personality 
that they have become part of himself. 
This deepest and most vital of all 
the processes of self-education and 
self-unfolding, which is brought to 
such perfection in men of the highest 
creative power, is the fundamental 
process of culture, — the chief method 
which every man uses, consciously or 
unconsciously, who brings his nature 
14 209 



The Unconscious Element. 

to complete ripeness of quality and 
power. The absorption of vital ex- 
perience and knowledge which went 
on in Shakespeare enlarged and clari- 
fied his vision and insight to such a 
degree that both became not only 
searching, but veracious in a rare de- 
gree ; life was opened to him on 
many sides by the expansion first ac- 
complished in himself. This is say- 
ing again what has been said so many 
times, but cannot be said too often, — 
that, in order to give one's work a 
touch of greatness, a man must first 
have a touch of greatness in his own 
nature. But greatness is not an irre- 
sponsible and undirected growth ; it 
is as definitely conditioned on certain 
obediences to intellectual discipline 
and spiritual law as is any kind of 
lesser skill conditioned on practice 
and work. One of these conditions 

2IO 



The Unconscious Element. 

is the development of the power to 
turn conscious processes of observa- 
tion, emotion, and skill into uncon- 
scious processes ; to enrich the nature 
below the surface, so to speak ; to 
make the soil productive by making 
it deep and rich. Men of mere skill 
always stop short of this final process 
of self-development, and always stop 
short of those final achievements 
which sum up and express all that 
has been known or felt about a sub- 
ject and give it permanent form ; men 
of essential greatness take this last 
step in that higher education which 
makes one master of the force of his 
personality, and give his words and 
works universal range and perennial 
interest. 

Now, this is the deepest quality in 
the books of life, which a student 
may not only enjoy to the full, but 

211 



The Unconscious Element. 

may also absorb and make his own. 
When Alfred de Musset, in an oft- 
repeated phrase, said that it takes a 
great deal of life to make a little art, 
he was not only affirming the reality 
of this process of passing experience 
through consciousness into the un- 
conscious side of a man's nature, but 
he was also hinting at one of the 
greatest resources of pleasure and 
growth. For time and life continu- 
ally enrich the man who has learned 
the secret of turning experience 
and observation into knowledge and 
power. It is a secret in the sense in 
which every vital process is a secret ; 
but it is not a trick, a skill, or a 
method which may be communicated 
in a formula. Mrs. Ward describes 
a character in one of her stories as 
having passed through a great culture 
into a great simplicity of nature ; in 

212 



The Unconscious Element. 

other words, culture had wrought its 
perfect work, and the man had passed 
through wide and intensely self-con- 
scious activity into the repose and 
simplicity of self-unconsciousness ; his 
knowledge had become so completely 
a part of himself that he had ceased 
to be conscious of it as a thing dis- 
tinct from himself. There is no easy 
road to this last height in the long and 
painful process of education ; and time 
is an essential element in the process, 
because it is a matter of growth. 

There are, it is true, a few men and 
women who seem born with this 
power of living in the heart of things 
and possessing them in the imagina- 
tion without having gone through the 
long and painful stages of preparatory 
education ; but genius is not only in- 
explicable, it is also so rare that for 
the immense majority of men any ef- 
213 



The Unconscious Element. 

fort to comprehend it must be purely 
academic. It is enough to know that 
if we are in any degree to share with 
men and women of genius the faculty 
of vision, insight, and creative energy, 
we must master the conditions which 
favor the development of those su- 
preme gifts. There is laid, therefore, 
upon the student who wishes to get 
the vital quality of literature the ne- 
cessity of repeating, by deliberate and 
intelligent design, the process which 
in so many of the masters of the arts 
has been, apparently, accomplished 
instinctively. To make observation, 
study, and experience part of one's 
spiritual and intellectual capital, it is, 
in the first place, necessary to saturate 
one's self with that which one is 
studying; to possess it by constant 
familiarity; to let the imagination 
play upon it; to meditate upon it. 
214 



The Unconscious Element. 

And it is necessary, in the second 
place, to make this practice habitual ; 
when it becomes habitual, it will be- 
come largely unconscious : one does 
it by instinct rather than by delibera- 
tion. This process is illustrated in 
every successful attempt to master 
any art. In the art of speaking, for 
instance, the beginner is hampered 
by an embarrassing consciousness of 
his hands, feet, speech ; he cannot 
forget himself and surrender himself 
to his thought or his emotion ; he 
dare not trust himself. He must, 
therefore, train himself through mind, 
voice, and body ; he must submit to 
constant and long-sustained practice, 
thinking out point by point what he 
shall say and how he shall say it. 
This process is, at the start, partly 
mechanical ; in the nature of things it 
must be entirely within the view and 
215 



The Unconscious Element. 

control of a vigilant consciousness. 
But as the training progresses, the 
element of self-consciousness steadily 
diminishes, until, in great moments, 
the true orator, become one harmo- 
nious instrument of expression, sur- 
renders himself to his theme, and his 
personality shines clear and luminous 
through speech, articulation, and ges- 
ture. The unconscious nature of the 
man subordinates his skill wholly to 
its own uses. In like manner, in 
every kind of self-expression, the stu- 
dent who puts imagination, vitality, 
and sincerity into the work of prelim- 
inary education, comes at last to full 
command of himself, and gives com- 
plete expression to that which is deep- 
est and most individual in him. 
Time, discipline, study, and thought 
enrich every nature which is receptive 
and responsive. 

216 



Chapter XIX. 
The Teaching of Tragedy. 

^TO characters appeal more power- 
fully to the imagination than 
those impressive figures about whom 
the literature of tragedy moves, — 
figures associated with the greatest 
passions and the most appalling sor- 
rows. The well-balanced man, who 
rises step by step through discipline 
and work to the highest place of 
influence and power, is applauded 
and admired ; but the heart of the 
world goes out to those who, like 
CEdipus, are overmatched by a fate 
which pursues with relentless step, or, 
217 



The Teaching of Tragedy, 

like Hamlet, are overweighted with 
tasks too heavy or too terrible for 
them. Agamemnon, GEdipus, Ores- 
tes, Hamlet, Lear, Pere Goriot, are 
supreme figures in that world of the 
imagination in which the poets have 
endeavoured both to reflect and to 
interpret the world as men see it and 
act in it. 

The essence of tragedy is the col- 
lision between the individual will, 
impulse, or action, and society in 
some form of its organisation, or 
those unwritten laws of life which 
we call the laws of God. The tragic 
character is always a lawbreaker, but 
not always a criminal ; he is, indeed, 
often the servant of a new idea which 
sets him, as in the case of Guido 
Bruno, in opposition to an established 
order of knowledge ; he is sometimes, 
as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of 
218 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

truths which make him a menace to 
lower conceptions of citizenship and 
narrower ideas of personal life ; or he 
is, as in the case of Othello and Paoli, 
the victim of passions which over- 
power the will and throw the whole 
life out of relation to its moral and 
social environment. The interest 
with which the tragic character is 
always invested is due not only to 
the exceptional experience in which 
the tragic situation always culmi- 
nates, but also to the self-surrender 
which precedes the penalty and the 
expiation. 

There is a fallacy at the bottom of 
the admiration we feel when a rich 
nature throws restraint of any kind 
to the winds and gives itself up 
wholly to some impulse or passion, — 
the fallacy of supposing that by a 
violent break with existing conditions 
219 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

freedom can be secured ; for the 
world loves freedom, even when it 
is too slothful or too cowardly to 
pay the price which it exacts. That 
admiration arises, however, from a 
sound instinct, — the instinct which 
makes us love both power and self- 
sacrifice, even when the first is ill- 
directed and the second wasted. The 
vast majority of men are content to 
do their work quietly and in obscur- 
ity, with no disclosure of originality, 
freshness, or force ; they obey law, 
conform to custom, respect the con- 
ventionalities of their age ; they ap- 
pear to be lacking in representative 
quality ; they are, apparently, the 
faithful and uninteresting drudges of 
society. There are, it is true, a host of 
commonplace persons, in every gen- 
eration, who perform uninteresting 
tasks in a mechanical spirit; but it 
220 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

must not be inferred that a man is 
either craven or cowardly because he 
does not break from the circle in 
which he finds himself and make a 
bold and picturesque rush for free- 
dom ; it may be that freedom is to 
be won for him in the silent and 
faithful doing of the work which lies 
next him ; it is certain that the high- 
est power and the noblest freedom 
are secured, not by the submission 
which fears to fight, but by that 
which accepts the discipline for the 
sake of the mastery which is con- 
ditioned upon it. 

There are, however, conditions 
which no man can control, and which 
are in their nature essentially tragic ; 
and men and women who are in- 
volved in these conditions cannot 
elude a fate for which they are not 
responsible and from which they can- 

221 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

not escape. This was true of many 
of the greatest characters in classical 
tragedy, and it is true also of many 
of the characters in modern tragedy. 
The world looks with bated breath 
on a struggle of the noblest heroism, 
in which men and women, matched 
against overwhelming social forces, 
bear their part with sublime and un- 
faltering courage, and by the com- 
pleteness of their self-surrender assert 
their sovereignty even in the hour 
when disaster seems to crush and 
destroy them. To these striking 
figures, isolated by the greatness of 
their fate, the heart of the world has 
always gone out as to the noblest 
of its children. Solitary in the pos- 
session of some new conception of 
duty or of truth, separated from the 
mass of their fellows by that lack 
of sympathy which springs from im- 

222 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

perfect comprehension of higher aims 
or deeper insight, these sublime 
strugglers against ignorance, preju- 
dice, caste, and power, become the 
heroes and martyrs of the race ; they 
announce the advent of new con- 
ceptions of social order and indi- 
vidual rights ; they incarnate the 
imperishable soul of humanity in its 
long and terrible endeavour to bring 
the institutions and the ideas of men 
into harmony with a higher order of 
life. 

The tragic element has, therefore, 
many aspects, — sometimes lawless 
and destructive, sometimes self-sacri- 
ficing and instructive ; but its illustra- 
tion in literature in any form is not 
only profoundly interesting, but pro- 
foundly instructive as well. In no 
other literary form is the stuff of 
which life is made wrought into such 
223 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

commanding figures ; in no other 
form are the deeper possibilities of 
life brought into such clear view ; in 
no other form are the fundamental 
laws of life disclosed in a light at 
once so searching and so beautiful in 
its revealing power. If all the his- 
tories were lost and all the ethical 
discussions forgotten, the moral qual- 
ity of life and the tremendous signifi- 
cance of character would find adequate 
illustration in the great tragedies. 
They lay bare the very heart of man 
under all historic conditions ; they 
make us aware of the range of his 
experiences; they uncover the depths 
by which he is surrounded. , They 
enable us to see, in lightning flashes, 
the undiscovered territory which in- 
closes the little island on which we 
live ; they light up the mysterious 
background of invisible forces against 
224 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

which we play our parts and work 
out our destiny. 

To the student of literature, who 
strives not only to enjoy but to com- 
prehend, tragedy brings all the mate- 
rials for a deep and genuine education. 
Instead of a philosophical or ethical 
statement of principles, it offers living 
illustration of ethical law as revealed 
in the greatest deeds and the most 
heroic experiences ; it discloses the 
secret of the age which created it, — 
for in no other literary form are the 
fundamental conceptions of a period 
so deeply involved or so clearly set 
forth. The very springs of Greek 
character are uncovered in the Greek 
tragedies ; and the tremendous forces 
liberated by the Renaissance are no- 
where else so strikingly brought to 
light as in that group of tragedies 
which were produced in so many 
15 225 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

countries, by so many men, at the 
close of that momentous epoch. 
When literature runs mainly to the 
tragic form, it may be assumed that 
the spiritual force of the race has ex- 
pressed itself afresh, and that a race, or 
a group of races, has passed through 
one of those searching experiences 
which bring men again face to face 
with the facts of life ; for the produc- 
tion of tragedy involves thought of 
such depth, insight of such clearness, 
and imaginative power of such quality 
and range that it is possible, on a 
great scale, only when the springs of 
passion and action have been pro- 
foundly stirred. The appearance of 
tragedy marks, therefore, those mo- 
ments when men manifest, without 
calculation or restraint, all the power 
that is in them ; and into no other 
literary form is the vital force poured 
226 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

so lavishly. It is the instinctive 
recognition of this unveiling of the 
soul of man which gives the tragedy 
such impressiveness even when it is 
haltingly represented on the stage, 
and which subdues the imagination 
to its mood when the solitary reader 
comes under its spell. The life of 
the race is sacred in those great pas- 
sages which record its sufferings ; and 
nothing makes us so aware of our 
unity with our kind in all times and 
under all circumstances as the com- 
munity of suffering in which, actively 
or passively, all men share. 

In the tragedy the student of liter- 
ature is brought into the most inti- 
mate relation with his race in those 
moments when its deepest experiences 
are laid bare ; he enters into its life 
when that life is passing through its 
most momentous passages; heispres- 
227 



The Teaching of Tragedy. 

ent in those hidden places where it 
confesses its highest hopes, reveals its 
most terrible passions, suffers its most 
appalling punishments, and passes on, 
through anguish and sacrifice, to its 
new day of thought and achievement. 



228 



Chapter XX. 

The Culture Element in Fiction. 

/~\NE of the chief elements in fic- 
tion which make for culture is, 
primarily, its disclosure of the ele- 
mentary types of character and ex- 
perience. A single illustration of this 
quality will suggest its presence in all 
novels of the first rank and its uni- 
versal interest and importance. The 
aspirations, dreams, devotions, and 
sacrifices of men are as real as their 
response to self-interest or their tend- 
ency to the conventional and the 
commonplace ; and they are, in the 
long run, a great deal more influen- 
tial. They have wider play ; they 
are more compelling; and they are 
of the very highest significance, be- 
229 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

cause they spring out of that which 
is deepest and most distinctive in hu- 
man nature. A host of men never 
give these higher impulses, these spir- 
itual aptitudes and possibilities, full 
play; but they are in all men, and all 
men recognise them and crave an ex- 
pression of them. Nothing is truer, 
on the lowest and most practical plane, 
than the old declaration that men do 
not live by bread alone ; they some- 
times exist on bread, because nothing 
better is to be had at the moment; 
but they live only in the full and free 
play of all their activities, in the com- 
plete expression not only of what is 
most pressing in interest and impor- 
tance at a given time, but of that which 
is potential and possible at all times. 

The novel of romance and adven- 
ture has had a long history, and the 
elements of which it is compounded 
230 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

are recognisable long before they took 
the form of fiction. Two figures ap- 
pear and reappear in the mythology 
of every poetic people, — the hero and 
the wanderer ; the man who achieves 
and the man who experiences ; the 
man who masters life by superiority 
of soul or body, and the man who 
masters it by completeness of knowl- 
edge. It is interesting and pathetic 
to find how universally these two fig- 
ures held the attention and stirred the 
hearts of primitive men ; how infi- 
nitely varied are their tasks, their perils, 
and their vicissitudes. They wear so 
many guises, they bear so many 
names, they travel so far and compass 
so much experience that it is impos- 
sible, in any interpretation of mythol- 
ogy, to escape the conviction that 
they were the dominant types in the 
thought of the myth-makers. And 
231 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

these earliest story-makers were not 
idle dreamers, entertaining themselves 
by endless manufacture of imaginary 
incidents, conditions, and persons. 
They were, on the contrary, the ob- 
servers, the students, the scientists of 
their period ; their endeavour was not 
to create a fiction, but to explain the 
world and themselves. Their obser- 
vation was imperfect, and they made 
ludicrous mistakes of fact because they 
lacked both knowledge and training ; 
but they made free use of the creative 
faculty, and there is, consequently, 
a good deal more truth in their dar- 
ing guesses than in many of those 
provisional explanations of nature and 
ourselves which have been based too 
exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious 
fact, and indifference to the fact, which 
is not less a fact because it is elusive. 
The myth-makers endeavoured to 
232 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

explain the world, but that was only 
one-half of their endeavour ; they at- 
tempted also to explain themselves. 
They discovered the striking analo- 
gies between certain natural phenom- 
ena or processes and the phenomena 
and processes of their own nature ; 
they discovered the tasks and wan- 
derings of the sun, and they per- 
ceived the singular resemblance of 
these tasks and wanderings to the hap- 
penings of their own lives. So the 
hero and the wanderer became sub- 
jective as well as objective, and sym- 
bolised what was deepest and most 
universal in human nature and human 
experience, as well as what was most 
striking in the external world. When 
primitive men looked into their hearts 
and their experience, they found their 
deepest hopes, longings, and possi- 
bilities bound up and worked out in 
233 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

two careers, — the career of the hero 
and the career of the wanderer. 

These two figures became the 
commanding types of all the nobler 
mythologies, because they symbolised 
what was best, deepest, and most 
real in human nature and life. They 
represent the possible reach and the 
occasional achievement of the human 
soul ; they stand for that which is 
potential as well as for that which is 
actual in human experience. Few 
men achieve or experience on a great 
scale ; but these few are typical, and 
are, therefore, transcendent in inter- 
est. The average commonplace man 
fills great space in contemporary his- 
tory, as in the history of all times, 
and his character and career are well 
worth the closest study and the finest 
art of the writer ; but the average 
man, who never achieves greatly, and 
234 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

to whom no striking or dramatic ex- 
perience comes, has all the possibili- 
ties of action and suffering in his 
nature, and is profoundly interested 
in these more impressive aspects of 
life. Truth to fact is essential to all 
sound art, but absolute veracity in- 
volves the whole truth, — the truth of 
the exceptional as well as of the aver- 
age experience ; the truth of the im- 
agination as well as of observation. 

The hero and the wanderer are 
still, and always will be, the great 
human types ; and they are, there- 
fore, the types which will continue 
to dominate fiction ; disappearing at 
times from the stage which they may 
have occupied too exclusively, but 
always reappearing in due season, — 
the hero in the novel of romance, 
the wanderer in the novel of adven- 
ture. These figures are as constant 
235 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

in fiction as they were in mythology ; 
from the days of the earliest Greek 
and Oriental stories to these days 
of Stevenson and Barrie, they have 
never lost their hold on the imagi- 
nation of the race. When the sense 
of reality was feeble, these figures be- 
came fantastic, and even ridiculous ; 
but this false art was the product of 
an unregulated, not of an illegiti- 
mate, exercise of the imagination ; 
and while cc Don Quixote " destroyed 
the old romance of chivalry, it left 
the instinct which produced that ro- 
mance untouched. As the sense of 
reality becomes more exacting and 
more general, the action of the ima- 
gination is more carefully regulated ; 
but it is not diminished, either in 
volume or in potency. Men have 
not lost the power of individual ac- 
tion because society has become so 
236 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

highly developed, and the multipli- 
cation of the police has not materi- 
ally reduced the tragic possibilities 
of life. There is more accurate and 
more extensive knowledge of envi- 
ronment than ever before in the his- 
tory of the race, but temperament, 
impulse, and passion remain as pow- 
erful as they were in primitive men ; 
and tragedy finds its materials in 
temperament, impulse, and passion, 
much more frequently than in objec- 
tive conditions and circumstances. 

The soul of man has passed 
through a great education, and has 
immensely profited by it; but its 
elemental qualities and forces remain 
unchanged. Two things men have 
always craved, — to come to close 
quarters with life, and to do some- 
thing positive and substantial. Self- 
expression is the prime need of human 
237 



The Culture Element in Fiction. 

nature ; it must know, act, and suf- 
fer by virtue of its deepest instincts. 
The greater and richer that nature, 
the deeper will be its need of see- 
ing life on many sides, of sharing in 
many kinds of experience, of con- 
tending with multiform difficulties. 
To drink deeply of the cup of life, 
at whatever cost, appears to be the 
insatiable desire of the most richly 
endowed men and women ; and with 
such natures the impulse is to seek, 
not to shun, experience. And that 
which to the elect men and women 
of the race is necessary and possible 
is not only comprehensible to those 
who cannot possess it : it is power- 
fully and permanently attractive. 
There is a spell in it which the dull- 
est mortal does not wholly escape. 1 

1 Reprinted in part, by permission, from the 
" Forum."" 

238 



Chapter XXL 
Culture through Action. 

TT is an interesting fact that the 
four men who have been ac- 
cepted as the greatest writers who 
have yet appeared, used either the 
epic or the dramatic form. It can 
hardly have been accidental that 
Homer and Dante gave their great- 
est work the epic form, and that 
Shakespeare and Goethe were in 
their most fortunate moments dram- 
atists. There must have been some 
reason in the nature of things for 
this choice of two literary forms 
which, differing widely in other re- 
spects, have this in common, that 
239 



Culture through Action. 

they represent life in action. They 
are very largely objective ; they por- 
tray events, conditions, and deeds 
which have passed beyond the stage 
of thought and have involved the 
thinker in the actual historical world 
of vital relationships and dramatic 
sequence. The lyric poet may sing, 
if it pleases him, like a bird in the 
recesses of a garden, far from the 
noise and dust of the highway and 
the clamour of men in the competi- 
tions of trade and work ; but the 
epic or dramatic poet must find his 
theme and his inspiration in the stir 
and movement of men in social rela- 
tions. He deals, not with the subjec- 
tive, but with the objective man ; 
with the man whose dreams are no 
longer visions of the imagination, 
but are becoming incorporate in 
some external order ; whose passions 
240 



Culture through Action. 

are no longer seething within him, 
but are working themselves out in 
vital consequences ; whose thought 
is no longer purely speculative, but 
has begun to give form and shape to 
laws, habits, or institutions. It is the 
revelation of the human spirit in 
action which we find in the epic and 
the drama ; the inward life working 
itself out in material and social rela- 
tions ; the soul of the man becom- 
ing, so to speak, externalised. 

The epic, as illustrated in the 
" Iliad " and "Odyssey," deals with 
a main or central movement in 
Greek tradition ; a series of events 
which, by reason of their nature and 
prominence, imbedded themselves 
in the memory of the Greek race. 
These events are described in narra- 
tive form, with episodes, incidents, 
and dialogues, which break the long 
16 241 



Culture through Action. 

story and relax the strain of at- 
tention from time to time, without 
interrupting the progress of the nar- 
rative. There are heroes whose 
figures stand out in the long story 
with great distinctness, but we are 
interested much more in what they 
do than in what they are ; for in the 
epic, character is subordinate to 
action. In the dramas of Shake- 
speare, on the other hand, while 
action is more constantly employed 
and is thrown into bolder relief, our 
deepest interest centres in the actors; 
the action is no longer the matter 
of first importance ; it is significant 
mainly because it involves men and 
women not only in the chain of ex- 
ternal consequences, but also in the 
order of spiritual sequences. We 
are deeply stirred by our perception 
of the intimate connection between 
242 



Culture through Action. 

the possibilities which lie sleeping 
in the individual life, and the tragic 
events which are set in motion when 
those possibilities are realised in 
action. In both epic and drama 
men are seen, not in their subjective 
moods, but in their objective strug- 
gles ; not in the detachment of the 
life of speculation and imagination, 
but in vital association and relation 
with society in its order and institu- 
tions. With many differences, both 
of spirit and form, the epic and the 
drama are at one in portraying men 
in that ultimate and decisive stage 
which determines individual char- 
acter and gives history its direction 
and significance. 

And it is from men in action that 
much of the deepest truth concern- 
ing life and character has come ; in- 
deed, it is not until we pass out of 
243 



Culture through Action. 

the region of the speculative, the 
merely potential, that the word 
"character" takes on that tremendous 
meaning with which thousands of 
years of actual happenings have in- 
vested it. A purely ideal world — 
a world fashioned wholly apart from 
the realities which convey definite, 
concrete revelations of what is in us 
and in our world — would neces- 
sarily be an unmoral world. The 
relationships which bind men to- 
gether and give human intercourse 
such depth and richness spring into 
being only when they are actually 
entered upon ; they could never be 
understood or foreseen in a world of 
pure thought ; nor would it be pos- 
sible, in such a world, to realise that 
reaction of the deed upon the doer 
which creates character, nor that far- 
reaching influence of the deed upon 
244 



Culture through Action. 

society, and the sequence of events 
which so often issues in tragedy and 
from which history derives its im- 
mense interest and meaning. A 
world which stopped short of reali- 
sation in action would not only lose 
the fathomless dramatic interest 
which inheres in human life, but it 
would part with all those moral im- 
plications of the integrity and per- 
sistence of the individual soul, its 
moral quality and its moral respon- 
sibility, which make man something 
different from the dust which whirls 
about him on the highway, or the 
stone over which he stumbles. 
This is precisely the character of 
those speculative systems which 
deny the reality of action and sub- 
stitute the idea for the deed ; such a 
world does more than suffocate the 
individual soul ; it destroys the very 
245 



Culture through Action. 

meaning of life by robbing it of 
moral order and meaning. The end 
of such a conception of the universe 
is necessarily annihilation, and its 
mood is necessarily despair. 

"How can a man come to know 
himself? " asked Goethe. cc Never 
by thinking, but by doing." Now, 
this knowledge of self in the large 
sense is precisely the knowledge 
which ripens and clarifies us, which 
gives us sanity, repose, and power. 
To know what is in humanity and 
what life means to humanity, we 
must study humanity in its active, 
not in its passive, moods ; in the 
hours when it is doing, not think- 
ing. Sooner or later all its thinking 
which has any reality in it passes 
on into action. The emotion, pas- 
sion, thought, impulse, which never 
gets beyond the subjective stage, dies 
246 



Culture through Action. 

before birth ; and all those philoso- 
phies which urge abstinence from 
action would cut the plant of life at 
the root; they are, in the last analy- 
sis, pleas for suicide. Men really 
live only as they freely express them- 
selves through thought, emotion, 
and action. They get at the deep- 
est truth and enter into the deepest 
relationships only as they act. In- 
action involves something more 
than the disease and decay of certain 
faculties ; it involves the deformity 
of arrested development, and failure 
to enter into that larger world of 
truth which is open to those races 
alone which live a whole life. It is 
for this reason that the drama must 
always hold the first place among 
those forms which the art of litera- 
ture has perfected ; it is for this 
reason that Homer, Dante, Shake- 
247 



Culture through Action. 

speare, and Goethe, consciously or 
unconsciously, chose those forms 
of expression which are specially 
adapted to represent and illustrate 
life in action ; it is for this reason, 
among others, that these writers 
must always play so great a part 
in the work of educating the race. 
Culture is, above all things, real and 
vital ; knowledge may deal with 
abstractions and unrelated bits of 
fact, but culture must always fasten 
upon those things which are signi- 
ficant in a spiritual order. It has 
to do with the knowledge which 
may become incorporate in a man's 
nature, and with that knowledge es- 
pecially which has come to human- 
ity through action. It is this deeper 
knowledge which holds a lighted torch 
aloft in the deepest recesses of the 
soul, or over those abysses of possi- 
248 



Culture through Action. 

ble experience which open on all 
sides about every man, which is to 
be found in the pages of Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and 
of all those great artists who have 
seen men in those decisive and sig- 
nificant moments when they strike 
into the movement of history, or, 
through their deeds and sufferings, 
the order of life suddenly shines 
forth. 



249 



Chapter XXII. 
The Interpretation of Idealism. 

TDEALISM has so often been as- 
sociated in recent years with vague- 
ness of thought, slovenly construction, 
and a weak sentimentalism, that it 
has been discredited, even among those 
who have recognised the reality be- 
hind it and the great place it must 
hold in all rich and noble living. It 
is the misfortune of what is called 
Idealism, that, like other spiritual 
principles, it attracts those who mis- 
take the longings of unintelligent dis- 
content for aspiration, or the changing 
outlines of vapory fancies for the firm 
and consistent form and shape of real 
250 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

conceptions deeply realised in the im- 
agination. Idealism has suffered much 
at the hands of feeble practition- 
ers who have substituted irrational 
dreams for those far-reaching visions 
and those penetrating insights which 
are characteristic of its true use and 
illustration in the arts. The height 
of the reaction so vigorously and im- 
pressively illustrated in a great group 
of modern realistic works is due 
largely to the weakness and extrava- 
gance of the idealistic movement. 
When sentiment is exchanged for its 
corrupting counterfeit, sentimentalism, 
and clear and definite thinking gives 
place to vague and elusive emotions 
and fancies, reaction is not only inevi- 
table but wholesome ; the instinct for 
sanity in men will always prevent 
them from becoming mere dreamers 
and star-gazers. 

25* 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

The true Idealist has his feet firmly 
planted on reality, and his idealism 
discloses itself not in a disposition to 
dream dreams and see visions, but in 
the largeness of a vision which sees 
realities in the totality of their rela- 
tions and not merely in their obvious 
and superficial relations. It is a great 
mistake to discern in men nothing 
more substantial than that movement 
of hopes and longings which is so 
often mistaken for aspiration ; it is 
equally a mistake to discern in men 
nothing more enduring and aspiring 
than the animal nature ; either report, 
standing by itself, would be funda- 
mentally untrue. Man is an animal ; 
but he is an animal with a soul, and 
the sane view of him takes both body 
and soul into account. The defect of 
a good deal of current Realism lies in 
its lack of veracity ; it is essentially 
252 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

untrue, and it is, therefore, funda- 
mentally unreal. The love of truth, 
the passion for the fact, the determi- 
nation to follow life wherever life 
leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and 
have borne noble fruit; but what is 
often called Realism has suffered quite 
as much as Idealism from weak practi- 
tioners, and stands quite as much in 
need of rectification and restatement. 

The essence of Idealism is the ap- 
plication of the imagination to reali- 
ties ; it is not a play of fancy, a golden 
vision arbitrarily projected upon the 
clouds and treated as if it had an ob- 
jective existence. Goethe, who had 
such a vigorous hold upon the reali- 
ties of existence, and who had also an 
artist's horror of mere abstractions, 
touched the heart of the matter when 
he defined the Ideal as the comple- 
tion of the real. In this simple but 
253 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

luminous statement he condensed 
the faith and practice not only of 
the greater artists of every age, but 
of the greater thinkers as well. In 
the order of life there can be no real 
break between things as they now ex- 
ist and things as they will exist in 
the remotest future ; the future can- 
not contradict the present, nor falsify 
it ; for the future must be the realisa- 
tion of the full possibilities of the 
present. The present is related to it 
as the seed is related to the flower and 
fruit in which its development cul- 
minates. There are vast changes of 
form and dimension between the seed 
and the tree hanging ripe with fruit, 
but there is no contradiction between 
the germ and its final unfolding. 

A rigid Realism, however, sees in 
the seed nothing but its present hard- 
ness, littleness, ugliness ; a true and 
254 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

rational Idealism sees all these things, 
but it sees also not only appearances 
but potentialities ; or, to recall another 
of Goethe's phrases, it sees the object 
whole. 

To see life clearly and to see it 
whole is not only to see distinctly the 
obvious facts of life, but to see these 
facts in sequence and order ; in other 
words, to explain and interpret them. 
The power to do this is one of the 
signs of a great imagination ; and, other 
things being equal, the rank of a 
work of art may, in the last analysis, 
be determined by the clearness and 
veracity with which explanation and 
interpretation are suggested. Homer 
is, for this reason, the foremost writer 
of the Greek race. He is wholly free 
from any purpose to give ethical in- 
struction ; he is absolutely delivered 
from the temptation to didacticism ; 
2 55 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

and yet he reveals to us the secret of 
the temperament and genius of his 
race. And he does this because he 
sees in his race the potentialities of 
the seed ; the vitality, beauty, fra- 
grance, and growth which lie enfolded 
in its tiny and unpromising substance. 
If the reality of a thing is not so 
much its appearance as the totality 
of that which is to issue out of it, 
then nothing can be truly seen with- 
out the use of the imagination. All 
that the Idealist asks is that life shall 
be seen not only with his eyes but 
with his imagination. His descriptions 
are accurate, but they are also vital ; 
they give us the thing not only 
as it looked standing by itself, but 
as it appeared in the complete life 
of which it was a part ; he makes 
us see the physical side of the fact 
with great distinctness, but he makes 
256 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

us see its spiritual side as well. As a 
result, there is left in our minds by 
the intelligent reading of Homer a 
clear impression of the spiritual, polit- 
ical, and social aptitudes and char- 
acteristics of the Greek people of his 
age, — an impression which no ex- 
act report of mere appearances could 
have conveyed ; an impression which 
is due to the constant play of the 
poet's imagination upon the facts with 
which he is dealing. 

This is true Idealism ; but it is 
also true Realism. It is not only the 
fact, but the truth. The fact may 
be observed, but the truth must be 
discerned by insight, — it is not 
within the range of mere observation ; 
and it is this insight, this discern- 
ment of realities in their relation to 
the whole order of things, which char- 
acterises true Idealism, and which 

J 7 257 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

makes all the greater writers Idealists 
in the fundamental if not in the tech- 
nical sense. Tolstoi has often been 
called a Realist by those who are 
eager to label everything and every- 
body succinctly ; but Tolstoi is one 
of the representative Idealists of his 
time, and his " Master and Man " is 
one of the most touching and sincere 
bits of true Idealism which has been 
given the world for many a day. 

There is nothing which needs such 
constant reinforcement as this faculty 
of seeing things in their totality ; for 
we are largely at the mercy of the 
hour unless we invoke the aid of the 
imagination to set the appearances of 
the moment in their large relations. 
To the man who sees things as they 
rush like a stream before him, there is 
no order, progression, or intelligent 
movement in human affairs ; but to 
258 



The Interpretation of Idealism. 

the student who brings to the study 
of current events wide and deep 
knowledge of the great historic move- 
ments, these apparently unrelated phe- 
nomena disclose the most intimate 
inter-relations and connections. The 
most despairing pessimism would be 
born in the heart of the man who 
should be fated to see to-day apart 
from yesterday and to-morrow ; a 
rational and inspiring hope may be 
born in the soul of the man who sees 
the day as part of the year and the 
year as part of the century. The great 
writers are a refuge from the point of 
view of the moment, because they set 
the events of life in a fundamental 
order, and make us aware of the finer 
potentialities of our race. They are 
Idealists in the breadth of their vision 
and the nobility of the interpretation 
of events which they offer us. 
259 



Chapter XXIII. 

The Vision of Perfection. 

HPHESE writers are also, by virtue 
of the faculty of discerning the 
interior relations of appearances and 
events, the expositors of that ultimate 
Idealism which not only discovers the 
possibility of the whole in the parts, 
of the perfect in the imperfect, but 
which discovers the whole, the com- 
plete and the perfect, and brings each 
before us in some noble form. The 
reality of the Ideal as Plato saw it is 
by no means universally accepted as a 
philosophical conclusion, but all high- 
minded men and women accept it as a 
rule of life. Idealism is wrought into 
260 



The Vision of Perfection. 

the very fibre of the race, and is as 
indestructible as the imagination in 
which it has its roots. Deep in the 
heart of humanity lies the unshak- 
able faith in its essential divinity, and 
in the reality of its highest hopes of 
development and attainment. The 
failure of noble schemes, the decline 
of enthusiasms, the fading of visions 
and dreams which seemed to have the 
luminous constancy of fixed stars, 
breed temporary depressions and pass- 
ing moods of scepticism and despair ; 
but the spiritual vitality of the race 
always reasserts itself, and faith returns 
after every disaster or disillusion. 

Indeed, as the race grows older and 
masters more and more a knowledge 
of its conditions, the impression of 
the essential greatness of the experi- 
ence we call life deepens in the finer 
spirits. It becomes clear that the 
261 



The Vision of Perfection. 

end towards which the hopes of the 
world have always moved is farther 
off than it seemed to the earlier gen- 
erations ; that the process of spiritual 
and social evolution is longer and 
more painful ; that the universe is 
vaster and more wonderful than the 
vision of it which formed in the im- 
agination of thinkers and poets ; in a 
word, that the education which is 
being imparted to humanity by the 
very structure of the conditions under 
which it lives grows more severe, 
prolonged, and exacting as its methods 
and processes become more clear. 
The broadening of the field of obser- 
vation has steadily deepened the im- 
pression of the magnitude and majesty 
of the physical order by which men 
are surrounded ; and the fuller knowl- 
edge of what is in human experience 
has steadily deepened the impression 
262 



The Vision of Perfection. 

of the almost tragic greatness of the 
lot of men. The disappointments of 
the race have been largely due to its 
inadequate conception of its own pos- 
sibilities ; its disillusions have been 
like the fading of the mirage which 
simulates against the near horizon 
that which lies long leagues away. 
These disappointments and disillu- 
sions, as Browning saw clearly, are 
essential parts of an education which 
leads the race step by step from 
smaller to larger ideas, from nearer 
and easier to more remote and diffi- 
cult attainments. 

The disappointment which comes 
with the completion of every piece of 
work well and wisely done does not 
arise from the futility of the work, as 
the pessimists tell us, but from its 
inadequacy to express entirely the 
thought and force of the man who 
263 



The Vision of Perfection. 

has striven to express himself com- 
pletely in a material which, however 
masterfully used, can never give its 
ultimate form to a spiritual concep- 
tion. It is not an evidence of failure, 
but a prophecy of greater achieve- 
ment. A world in which the work 
was as great as the worker, the piece 
of art as the artist, would be a finished 
world in more senses than one ; a 
world in which all work is inadequate 
to contain the energy of the worker, 
all art insufficient to express the soul 
of the artist, is necessarily a prophetic 
world, bearing witness to the presence 
of a creative force in workers and 
artists immeasurably beyond the ca- 
pacity of any perishable material to 
receive or to preserve. 

A rational Idealism is, therefore, 
not only indestructible in a race which 
does not violate the laws of life, but 
264 



The Vision of Perfection. 

is instilled into the higher order of 
minds by the order of life as revealed 
by science, history, and the arts. 
And this idealistic tendency is not 
only the poetic temper ; it is the hope 
and safeguard of society. The real 
perils of the race are not material ; they 
are always spiritual ; and no peril 
could be greater than the loss of faith 
and hope in the possibility of attain- 
ing the best things. If men are ever 
bereft of their instinctive or rational 
conviction that they have the power 
ultimately to bring institutions of all 
kinds into harmony with their higher 
conceptions, they will sink into the 
lethargy of despair or the slough of 
sensualism. The belief in the reality 
of the Ideal in personal and social life 
is not only the joy and inspiration of 
the poet and thinker ; it is also the 
salvation of the race. It is imperish- 
265 



The Vision of Perfection. 

able, because it is the product of the 
play of the imagination on the realities 
of life ; and until the imagination per- 
ishes, the vision of the ultimate per- 
fection will form and reform in the 
heart of every generation. It is the 
inspiration of every art, the end of 
every noble occupation, the secret 
hope of every fine character. 

Idealism in this sense, not as the 
product of an easy and ignorant op- 
timism turning away from the facts of 
life, but as the product of a large and 
spiritual dealing with those facts, is 
the very soul, not only of noble living, 
but of those noble expressions of life 
which the greater writers have given 
us. They disclose wide diversity of 
gifts, but they have this in common, — 
that, in discovering to us the spiritual 
order of the facts of life, they disclose 
also those ideal figures which the race 
266 



The Vision of Perfection. 

accepts as embodiments of its secrets, 
hopes, and aims. It is a significant 
fact that, in portraying the Greek of 
his time, Homer has given us also 
the ideal Greek and the Greek ideals. 
His insight went to the soul of the 
persons he described, and he struck 
into that spiritual order in which the 
ideal is not only a reality, but, in a 
sense, the only reality. 

Cervantes, in the very act of de- 
stroying a false Idealism, convention- 
ally conceived and treated, made one 
of the most beautiful revelations of a 
true Idealism which the world has yet 
received. Shakespeare's presentation 
of the facts of life is, on the whole, 
the most comprehensive and impres- 
sive which has yet been made ; in the 
disclosure of tragic elements it is un- 
surpassed ; and yet what a host of 
ideal figures move through the plays 
267 



The Vision of Perfection. 

and invest them with a light beyond 
the glow of art! In the Forest of 
Arden and on Prospero's Island there 
live, beyond the touch of time and 
the vicissitudes of fate, those gracious 
and beautiful spirits in whom the race 
sees its noblest hopes come true, 
its instinctive faith in itself justified. 
These spirits are not airy nothings, 
woven of the unsubstantial gossamer 
of which dreams are made ; they are 
born of a deep insight into the possi- 
bilities of the soul, and a rational faith 
in their reality. Prospero is as real as 
Trinculo, and Rosalind as true as 
Cressida. These ideal persons are 
not necessarily fortunate in their sur- 
roundings or happy in their lot ; they 
are simply perfect in their develop- 
ment of a type. They are not ab- 
normal beings, rising above normal 
conditions ; they are normal beings, 
268 



The Vision of Perfection. 

rising above abnormal conditions. 
They stand for wholeness amid frag- 
ments, for perfection amid imperfec- 
tion ; but the very imperfection and 
fragmentariness by which they are 
surrounded predicts their coming and 
affirms their reality. 

In the rounded and developed na- 
ture there must be a deep vein of the 
Idealism which grows out of the vision 
of things in their large relations — out 
of a view of men ample enough to 
discern not only what they are at this 
stage of development, but what they 
may become when development has 
been completed. Nothing is more 
essential than the courage, the joy, 
and the insight which grow out of 
such an Idealism, and no spiritual 
possession is more easily lost. The 
spiritual depression of a reactionary 
period, the routine of work, the im- 
269 



The Vision of Perfection. 

mersion in the stream of events, the 
decline of moral energy, conspire to 
blight this noble use of the imagina- 
tion, and to chill the faith which makes 
creative living and working possible. 
The familiar companionship of the 
great Idealists is one of the greatest 
resources against the paralysis of this 
faith and the decay of this faculty. 



270 



Chapter XXIV. 
Retrospect. 

T^HE books of four great writers 
have been used almost exclusively 
by way of illustration throughout this 
discussion of the relation of books to 
culture. This limited selection may 
have seemed at times too narrow and 
rigid; it may have conveyed an im- 
pression of insensibility to the vast 
range and the great variety of literary 
forms and products, and of indiffer- 
ence to contemporary writing. It 
needs to be said, therefore, that the 
constant reference to Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, and Goethe has been 
made for the sake of clearness and 
271 



Retrospect. 

force of illustration, and not, in any 
sense, as applying an exclusive princi- 
ple of selection. The books of life are 
to be found in every language, and are 
the product of almost every age ; and 
no one attains genuine culture who 
does not, through them, make him- 
self familiar with the life of each suc- 
cessive generation. To be ignorant 
of the thought and art of one's time 
involves a narrowness of intelligence 
which is inconsistent with the maturity 
of taste and ripeness of nature which 
have been emphasised in these chap- 
ters as the highest and finest fruits of 
culture. The more generous a man's 
culture becomes, the more catholic 
becomes his taste and the keener his 
insight. The man of highest intelli- 
gence will be the first to recognise the 
fresh touch, the new point of view, 
the broader thought. He will bring 
272 



Retrospect. 

to the books of his own time not only 
a trained instinct for sound work, but 
a deep sympathy with the latest effort 
of the human spirit to express itself in 
new forms. So deep and real will be 
his feeling for life that he will be eager 
to understand and possess every fresh 
manifestation of that life. However 
novel and unconventional the new 
form may be, it will not make its 
appeal to him in vain. 

It remains true, however, that liter- 
ature is a universal art, expressive and 
interpretative of the spirit of humanity, 
and that no man can make full ac- 
quaintance with that spirit who fails 
to make companionship with its great- 
est masters and interpreters. The 
appeal of contemporary books is so 
constant and urgent that it stands in 
small need of emphasis ; but the claims 
of the rich and splendid literature of 
18 273 



Retrospect. 

the past are often slighted or ignored. 
The supreme masters of an art ought 
to be the objects of constant study 
and thought; there is more of life, 
truth, and beauty in them than in 
their fellow-artists of narrower range 
of experience and artistic achievement. 
For this reason these greatest inter- 
preters of the human spirit are in no 
sense exclusively of the past ; they 
are of the present and the future. 
To know them is not only to know 
the particular periods in which they 
wrote, but to know our own period 
in the deepest sense. No man can 
better prepare himself to enter into 
the formative life of his time than by 
thoroughly familiarising himself with 
the greatest books of the past ; for in 
these are revealed, not the secrets of 
past forms of life, but the secrets of 
that spirit whose historic life is one 
274 



Retrospect. 

unbroken revelation of its nature and 
destiny. It is, therefore, no disparage- 
ment of the great company of writers 
who have been the secretaries of the 
race in all ages to fasten attention 
upon the claims of the four men of 
genius whom the world has accepted 
as the supreme masters of the art of 
literature, and to point out again the 
immense importance of their works 
in the educational life of the indi- 
vidual and of society. 

It cannot be said too often that 
literature is the product of the contin- 
uous spiritual activity of the race ; that 
it cannot be arbitrarily divided into 
periods save for mere convenience of 
arrangement; and that it is impossi- 
ble to understand and value its latest 
products unless one is able to find 
their place and discern their value in the 
order of a spiritual development. To 
275 



Retrospect. 

secure an adequate impression of this 
highest expression of the human spirit 
one must keep in view the work of 
the past quite as definitely as the 
work of the present ; in such a broad 
survey there is a constant deliverance 
from the rashness of contemporary 
judgments, and from that narrowness 
of feeling which limits one's vital con- 
tact with the life of the race to the 
products of a single brief period. 

In any attempt to indicate the fun- 
damental significance of the art of 
literature in the educational develop- 
ment of the individual and of society 
there must also be a certain repetition 
of idea and of illustration. This limi- 
tation, if it be a limitation, is inherent 
in the very nature of the undertaking. 
Literature is, for purposes of comment 
and exposition, practically inexhaust- 
ible ; its themes are as varied and as 
276 



Retrospect. 

numerous as the objects upon which 
the mind can fasten and about which 
the imagination can play. But while 
its forms and products are almost 
without number, this magnificent 
growth has, in the last analysis, a 
single root, and in these brief chapters 
the endeavour has been made, very 
inadequately, to bring the mind to 
this deep and hidden unity of life 
and art. Information, instruction, 
delight, flow in a thousand rivulets 
from as many books, but there is a 
spring of life which feeds all these 
separate streams. From that unseen 
source flows the vitality which has 
given power and freshness to a host 
of noble works ; from that source 
vitality also flows into every mind 
open to its incoming. A rich intel- 
lectual life is characterised not so much 
by profusion of ideas as by the appli- 
277 



Retrospect. 

cation of a few formative ideas to life ; 
not so much by multiplicity of de- 
tached thoughts as by the habit of 
thinking. The genius of Carlyle is 
evidenced not by prodigal growth of 
ideas, but by an impressive interpre- 
tation of life through the application 
to all its phenomena of a few ideas of 
great depth and range. And this is 
true of all the great writers who have 
given us fresh views of life from some 
central and commanding height rather 
than a succession of glimpses or out- 
looks from a great number of points. 
The closer the approach to the central 
force behind any course of develop- 
ment, the fewer in number are the 
elements involved. The rootage of 
literature in the spiritual nature and 
experience of the race is the funda- 
mental fact not only in the history of 
this rich and splendid art, but in its 
278 



Retrospect. 

relation to culture. From this root- 
age flows the vitality which imparts 
immortality to its noblest products, 
and which supplies an educational 
element unrivalled in its enriching 
and enlarging quality. 



279 



1 



>.•■**#! V 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




010 732 546 3 



* ■ ^.'<#VJ 















■ 

I •■*> *•'>,> I I H 

J8RKK . ' I ■ • - ■ ..:-t# I Both ^vaw 



■ ■ ! 



■^■^■fl 



